



V ** *^ °'%P* ,/ "*^ ■ 





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Dome de TInstitut 



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Pages from 

The Book of Paris 










1, ,i 



IV > V 




Aux Ambassadeurs 



Pages from 
The Book of Paris 

By 

Claude C. Washburn 

Etchings and drawings by 
Lester G. Hornby 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1910 



n 



^ 



COPYRIGHT, iglO, BY CLAUlDE C. WASHBURN AND LESTER G. HORNBY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqio 



C'CI,A2?51m1 



Contents 

The Book of Paris i 

Sidewalk Cafes 9 

I Choose my Home 35 

Two Plays 99 

Au Bois 123 

Love in Paris 157 

In my Court 191 

Pere Lachaise — An Impression 219 

An Interview 247 



Dans le Jardin du Luxembourg 



^uo'Jim^'XMA ^\i rn^-^ji^ %\ iwsid 



Illustrations 




Illustrations 



Dome de I'lnstitut 




Half-title 


Aux Ambassadeurs 




Frontispiece '^ 


Dans le Jardin du Luxembourg 




V 


In Montmartre 




I 


In the Luxembourg Gardens 




4v- 


Sidewalk Cafes 




7 


Cafe du Rond Point 




i8 


Proprietor of a Little Shop 




24 


Along the Quay 




33 


Street Vendors 




36 


The Seine at Notre Dame 




40 


A Parisienne 




50 


A Little Street near Boulevard St. 


Germain 


60 


Au " Rat Mort " 




64 


On He de la Cite 




68 


[ vii ] 







Illustrations 



Old Passage, Palais Royal 78 

Court of the Louvre 82 

In the Faubourg St. Germain 86 

At La Gaite 97 

Entrance to a " Bal " 100 

Street of the Little Butcher Shop no 

A Cocotte 121 

In the Bois de Boulogne 124 

At the Chateau de Madrid 134 

An Old Habitue 142 

Cochers 150 

Fiacres 155 

La Lettre d' Amour 160 

Le Modele 168 

Cafe in the Bois 180 

Linette 188 

Towers of St. Sulpice 1 89 

In the Garden of the Luxembourg 192 
[ viii ] 



Illustrations 

Old Court in Rue Vercingetorix 200 

St. Etienne du Mont 217 

Small Shops, Rue de Rennes 222 

On Boulevard Montparnasse 242 

On the Boulevard 245 

Little Balconies 248 

In the Quartier du Pantheon 252 

Passage des Patriarches — Rue MoufFetard 262 

On Boulevard Sebastopol 274 

Cafes 278 



In Montmartre 



T^he Book of Paris 









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I 




The Book of Paris 

HERE are two classes of people 
who come to Paris, — those to 
whom, though they may be fa- 
miliar with every monument, 
have wandered in every quartter, have crossed 
the Place de la Concorde daily for twenty 
years, Paris never means more than the sum 
of its thousand interests; and those who feel 
within themselves the overpowering, con- 
stantly increasing sense of the great city's 
personality. To the former Paris gives no 
heed, but in the hearts of the latter she is 
always writing her book. It is a book of in- 
finite variety, exalted and prophetic, deli- 
cately fanciful and gay, sombre with the 
misery of existence, according to the mate- 
rials on which it is written ; but it is always 
[3 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

significant, never petty. When it is finished, 
it will hold the story of the human soul; 
but it will never be finished. 

Paris is not the subject of the book: Paris 
is only the medium. It is in her style, since 
it is she who writes; but its subject is Life, 
and whatever, good or bad, has any bearing 
upon life is to be found somewhere in its 
pages, without embellishment and without 
euphemism. Nothing is disguised, nothing 
falsified ; for Paris herself is inscrutable, set- 
ting down with purposeless impartiality all 
that touches her subject. A universal reader 
for the book, if such were to be found, would 
need, I think, to be part god, part demon * 
for no one man could rise high enough to 
grasp half its noble beauty, and none surely 
be found base enough to comprehend all its 
black ugliness. 

I, too, wandering along the boulevards, 

musing in the Luxembourg Gardens, or 

watching at night from the bridges the red 

and yellow lights swirling in the black river, 

[ 4 ] 



In the Luxembourg Gardens 



^he Book of Paris 

have felt repeatedly the strange thrill of com- 
prehension, and have known that in me also 
some pages vv^ere being added to the Book 
of Paris, — confused, it was true, often inco- 
herent, and never of the greatest, but of the 
book, nevertheless. Such as they were, I have 
tried here to transcribe them for you. The 
task was not easy. It has been as though I 
were translating painfully from one language 
into another. Rigid, sharp -edged words, 
made for the expression of definite logical 
thought, were hard moulds into which to 
pour the fragments of ideas and the shifting, 
inconsequential moods that Paris gave me. 
Something, however, of the original always 
shines through even the worst translation, 
and for the substance of the rambling es- 
says that follow I make no apology. If the 
thoughts and the feelings with which Paris 
filled me were indeed, as I truly think them, 
pages from the book of herself, then, how- 
ever minor, they cannot but have some worth. 



Sidewalk Cafes 



l?\s>0 ^\ 



Sidewalk Cafes 




II 

Sidewalk Cafes 

^M^^S NEVER have been able to ap- 
preciate London. It is not that 
I am unmoved by its monu- 
ments, that I do not feel a rev- 
erent avs^e before the Abbey, that the Tem- 
ple leaves me cold; or that to watch the 
great murky Thames flowing beneath the 
Tower Bridge at sunset does not stir me 
strangely; but simply that the spirit of the 
whole place remains aloof from me, outside 
my comprehension, like the mood of a poem 
in a foreign language with which I am un- 
familiar, or which I can but spell out halt- 
ingly. Often, in gazing down from the top 
of an omnibus on the rush of the throng in a 
crowded gray-walled street, I have felt, with 
the swift, poignant sensation that one has in 
[9] 



The Book of Paris 

searching his mind for a forgotten name, 
that I was upon the point of understanding, 
that at last the whole huge city was about to 
assume an entity for me; when suddenly we 
would pass, almost within arm's reach, an 
insistent London statue, and I would find 
myself plunged into the deadening and over- 
whelming sense of the commonplaceness 
of all things, — myself included, — and the 
gleam would be gone. For the greatest harm 
in ugliness is not the sharp, quickly-passed 
pain which it inflicts, but the more enduring 
numbness and stupor it imparts to our minds. 
It seems to me now, in reviewing these oc- 
currences, that each time it was the statue 
of Queen Victoria that so depressed me; but 
this is probably a delusion, due to the fact 
that nearly all London statues resemble that 
kindly monarch. Yet it is less the ugliness 
of London which prevents one's understand- 
ing it, than the fact that one is always part 
and parcel of it. Fight as one may to pre- 
serve his own personality, he feels it slipping 
[ 10 ] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

from him, and himself but an infinitely 
unimportant fragment of the mass. Only a 
collective existence is possible. One cannot 
study these millions of which one is part; 
one has no mental vantage-ground. There 
is no solitude possible in a London throng. 
It is the fierce hopelessness of this struggle 
to retain his own identity that makes an in- 
dividualist so unhappy in London ; for an 
individualist must in the midst of everything 
feel himself detached from the rest of life, 
and here no detachment is possible. That 
there should have arisen in the press of this 
collectivism men capable of guarding their 
own souls, of living in the crowd but aloof 
from it, and so framing for themselves a 
conception of life out of this relentless over- 
bearing unity, appears to me a miracle; but 
there have been many, the splendid excep- 
tions which have made England's glory. 
De Quincey, Dickens, Thackeray, Mere- 
dith, — to name only a few, — all of them 
lived their own lives, and, reflecting in the 
[ II ] 



"The Book of Paris 

solitude of their individualism, found, each 
according to the measure of his genius, a 
greater or a lesser meaning, a deeper or a 
more superficial significance, in this chaos 
that engulfs smaller men. 

In France the individual is the unit ; but 
in England the unit is the v^hole. London 
is only England intensified. The individual 
rights of which the Englishman is so proud 
are only material rights that affect his bod- 
ily comfort ; of genuine personal liberty he 
has no conception. He may walk the streets 
in almost complete safety from physical at- 
tack ; but he has thrust upon him from child- 
hood the cold formalism of an established 
religion. The precincts of his property are 
rigorously protected against aggression ; but 
socially he himself is born into as iron-clad 
a system of slavery as has ever existed. Rich 
or poor, of high rank or low, he is classified 
at birth as a member of a caste in which 
not the individual but the type is the reality. 
A certain mode of existence, and even a 

[ 12 ] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

certain sharply marked-out attitude of mind, 
are characteristic of each class, and this con- 
ventionalism extends to the most minute 
trivialities ; for nothing is trivial where no- 
thing is individual but always a symbol of 
the whole. Suggest to an Englishman an act 
that would be an infringement, however 
slight, on a class to which he does not be- 
long : he will not reply, " I cannot do that 
because — "; but simply, "That is not 
done." The system is perfect. 

Nor does the Englishman want it changed. 
I can find no analogy for the willing pride 
with which he accepts his bondage. Imagine 
all the negroes of the South rising as one 
man at the time of the emancipation, cry- 
ing, " We will not be free," and turning in 
anger on President Lincoln, and you have 
but a feeble likeness to the attitude of the 
English toward their would-be liberators ; 
for the negroes were only stupid children, 
while the English are a race of men, en- 
lightened, "progressive," — whatever that 
[ 13 ] 



The Book of Paris 

may mean, — almost civilized indeed, one 
would say, if it were not for their deplorable 
lack of taste. 

A refusal to acknowledge any part of the 
system would not entail loss of material privi- 
leges, — materially, and materially alone, the 
Englishman is free, — but it would mean so- 
cial ostracism, misunderstanding, contempt, 

— all the things which, as they are the least 
material, are the hardest for the genuinely 
free man to bear. The lives of England's 
great men, — poets, novelists, philosophers, 

— who even in London raised themselves 
above the crowd and kept clear of the ma- 
chine, have not often been easy. For they, 
standing aside and observing the whole, saw 
faults and pointed out wrongs. In England 
" that is not done." These men were strong 
personalities. They achieved their individ- 
ualism themselves; for in England there are 
no aids to solitude. 

But giants are rare, and for humbler indi- 
vidualists a sojourn in London is misery, a 
[ 14] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

period of feeling his ideas effaced, his per- 
sonaHty suspended. Formerly I used to force 
myself to stay on, feeling that I must not go 
until I had been somehow enabled to get 
apart from and understand the monster, but 
my heroism never came to anything. A day 
always arrived when my longing for France 
grew too strong, and I would take a boat for 
Calais or Dieppe. The experience was, I dare 
say, bad for my character ; for as my virtue 
never resulted in success, I at last reached the 
conclusion that it is not the disagreeable but 
the pleasant things in life which are good for 
one, so that now I never do anything I do not 
care to do. 

Any one w^ho has traveled much by moun- 
tain-railways knows the sensation of ease and 
relaxation one receives when, after grinding 
painfully down a long grade, the brakes are 
at last released and the train glides smoothly 
on. I can find no other simile to express the 
relief with which one throws off the yoke of 
London. I have never crossed from England 
[ 15 ] 



The Book of Paris 

to France without experiencing this emo- 
tion, and I have never arrived in Paris with- 
out a sense of exhilaration in which I felt my 
own personality rise, and assert itself, and 
seem to me worth while. No other city can 
ever mean to me what Paris means. As I sit 
here writing, needing only to lift my eyes to 
the window to see the gray Seine flowing be- 
neath and the misty blue-gray sky softening 
the mass of houses beyond the river, I feel 
a rush of gratitude for all that Paris has 
given me. 

As a child, before I had been out of 
America, it was always Florence of which 
I dreamed ; and indeed, though, seen, Flor- 
ence proved quite different from the picture 
I had made of it, the realization was no dis- 
appointment. But in Florence one leads only 
the most perfect of existences. One is con- 
tent to feel : one has no need of thinking. 
In any one not born to it the excess of beauty 
of the Tuscan city causes a kind of intoxica- 
tion that inhibits achievement. One might 
[ i6] 



Sidewalk Cafes 



become witty if he lived long in Florence, 

— most people do, I believe: — Marcel 
Schwob might have written his "Mimes" 
there ; — but for real achievement a state of 
mental turmoil is necessary, and how is one 
to arouse a mental turmoil before the warm 
sun-bathed splendor of these brown old Ital- 
ian palaces, or at Settignano, where the 
nightingales sing all night and all day too, 
and where the cypresses turn blue-black in 
the moonlight? 

But in Paris one lives, — so fully, and richly, 
and tumultuously, that I wonder sometimes 
whether one is not living his life too fast, like 
a mouse under oxygen, and whether one will 
not die at thirty. One's mind seethes. One 
is overwhelmed with ideas. Little or great, 

— what does it matter ? What matters is that 
here whoever comes really to know Paris 
learns to be himself at his truest, to think the 
deepest thoughts of which he is capable. All 
Paris is an inspiration to individualism. The 
sweeping vastness of the Place de la Con- 

[ 17] 



The Book of Paris 

corde is the emblem of it ; the sidewalk cafes 
are its symbol. 

In Paris every man has a favorite cafe to 
which he pays allegiance, and in his choice 
he reveals something of his character; for it 
is only in the outward material expression 
of themselves — busy, white-aproned waiters, 
cane chairs, and little marble-topped tables, 
covering half the sidewalk on the boulevards, 
all of it in narrow streets, — that these thou- 
sand havens resemble one another ; more pro- 
foundly each has its own individuality. The 
youth seeks the maiden who, born to be his 
mate, languishes somewhere or other in ex- 
pectation of his coming; with far more cer- 
tainty of success he may in Paris go in quest 
of a cafe which shall just fit his character. 
Moreover, the cafe is always there waiting, 
whereas maidens have been known to — But 
that has nothing to do with the subject. 

It took me a long time to find my cafe, 
a troubled time in which I tried many sorts, 
feeling in each — though in many I recog- 
[ i8 ] 



Cafe du Rond Point 



Sidewalk Cafes 



nized a certain charm — a kind of uneasi- 
ness akin to that of a man in clothes made 
for some one else. I early saw that it was 
not among the sleepy little cafes of quiet, 
secluded streets that I should discover mine ; 
for, as one feels himself most a part of life 
in the fields where there is no other human 
in sight, so it is in the very centre of the 
throng that one is capable of the completest 
detachment. The habitues of these retired 
places, who chatted comfortably over their 
games of dominoes and mamlle, were pleas- 
ant, kindly men for whom I felt sympathy, 
but they were not individualists. They were, 
for the greater part, petty employes of some 
bureau^ in search of rest after their six hours 
of dreary mechanical work; and rest is to 
be found in losing one's identity, in becom- 
ing a part of life, not in separating one's self 
from it. The individualist does not desire 
rest. What he strives for is the ability to 
regard unhampered the great pageant of life, 
as though he himself bore no relation to it; 
[ 19] 



The Book of Paris 

and how should there be rest in the contem- 
plation of this strange spectacle, with its ab- 
surdities which he labors to reconcile, and its 
heterogeneity in which he struggles to find 
some meaning? 

No, the cafe of my desire would be one of 
the many that line the wide, feverish boule- 
vards. That was clear, — far less clear which. 
The Cafe de la Paix I knew, to begin with, 
was out of the question. In that ostentatious 
resort beloved of foreigners, where one is 
assaulted by vendors of post-cards, furs, and 
maps of Paris, and where one hears all about 
him his native tongue spoken with a high 
nasal intensity characteristic of it nowhere 
except in Europe, solitude is as impossible as 
in London itself. But, the Cafe de la Paix 
eliminated, there remained still a discourag- 
ing number, among which somewhere was 
mine. 

I spent many afternoons in fruitless search ; 
then one evening I found it, in the only fash- 
ion by which one ever finds anything worth 

[ 20] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

while, — quite by chance. I do not remem- 
ber where I was going, or why, only that 
I was being carried on in the crowd that 
streams along the Boulevard des Italiens at 
the theatre hour, when suddenly, before one 
of the numberless displays of little tables 
(and for what reason this one, I wonder, more 
than another ?), I turned in a flash of recogni- 
tion. " Why, it 's my cafe ! " I exclaimed in 
the tone with which one greets an old friend. 
It was, without a doubt. Although I had 
surely never been there before, everything 
seemed natural and right. Even the faces of 
the men at the tables appeared familiar. For, 
as in Paris one chooses the cafe with the 
spirit of which he is most in sympathy, so 
in each the habitues form a circle of men, 
united, not, as in a salon, by the same habits 
of life, but by the same habits of thought, 
which is a closer bond. We rarely converse 
at my cafe, but we bow to one another 
as we arrive, and the absence of one at his 
accustomed hour is remarked by the rest. 

[21 ] 



The Book of Paris 

There is to me something fine in this cu- 
rious intimacy of men who, never hav- 
ing exchanged banahties, indifferent to one 
another's names and conditions, by their 
ignorance of the petty differences among 
themselves efface them, and annihilate all 
the barriers — social and moral prejudices, 
personal foibles — over v^hich in the ordi- 
nary course of acquaintance one must strug- 
gle, or around which one must circuitously 
pass, — and arrive at once at the silent sym- 
pathy, the tacit recognition of similarity, 
that is friendship. 

The oddest thing about my cafe, one that 
has often made me smile, is its title, which im- 
plies mirth, revelry, even debauch, whereas 
in fact no other boulevard cafe surely is as 
serious and subdued as this one. It is called, 
— but, after all, why should I tell you its 
name ? If it is not your cafe, to go there 
would be to waste your time ; and if it is 
yours, you will find it some day of yourself; 
or perhaps you have found it already, and 

[22] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

are one of the unknown friends who nod 
kindly to me as I sHp into my place. 

I do not know what your thoughts may be 
there, if that is true, but my own are strange, 
and no less strange that other men have been 
thinking them these thousand years. Con- 
flicting, overwhelming impressions, tumult- 
uous fragments of ideas without beginning 
or end, confused reflections that I am impo- 
tent to classify ; strange thoughts indeed, — 
pitiful, ironic, gay sometimes, but always at 
bottom sad ; for although here I am in the 
tranquil back-waters, there, only a few feet 
away, all life is flowing past. Verlaine's splen- 
did lines come back to me : — 

" Et tu coules toujours, Seine, et tout en rampant, 
Tu traines dans Paris ton cours de vieux serpent, 
De vieux serpent boueux, emportant vers tes havres 
Tes cargaisons de bois, de houille, et de cadavres." 

But this is a greater river than the Seine. It 
too carries its proud ships and its derelicts — 
and its corpses ; only it flows into an un- 
known sea. 

[ 23 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

At first in the crowd drifting by me it is 
always individuals that I remark. A man 
passes close to me, holding a little girl of six 
by the hand, which for greater safety he 
keeps so high that she walks chiefly with her 
left foot, barely touching the ground from 
time to time with her right. She stumbles 
along contentedly, looking up at us, wide- 
eyed but incuriously, interested really only 
in a fruitless attempt to touch each in the 
nearest row of tables as she goes by. It occurs 
to me with a swift glimpse of myself (for in 
this isolation of the mind one's self seems 
as separate and objective as the rest of the 
world), that she is a very fortunate child. 
She knows what she wants and goes straight 
for it. That is the great thing, — to know 
what one wants and try for it. Nothing else 
matters much, — least of all whether one 
gets it or not. I hope she may always keep 
the characteristic, and I think, as I glance 
up at the face of her father, that she will. He 
is a big burly man of the class that is not the 
[24] 




Proprietor of a Little Shop 




kfri '^r"' 



Sidewalk Cafes 

People, nor yet quite the littlest bourgeoisie: 
proprietor, I imagine, of some small shop. 
As he strolls by (he is nearly past now), 
everything in his manner, from the erect 
poise of the head to the easy fashion with 
which he lets others avoid him rather than 
go out of his way himself, proclaims the man 
of fixed habits and settled life, accepting 
unreservedly the world as he finds it, with 
no desire to change it. Not a man of high 
aspirations, as aspirations are counted, but 
sure of the ones he has, — with his troubles, 
of course : small money matters chiefly, rent 
that comes due too frequently, clients who 
will not pay their bills ; blessed material 
troubles. Himself he never doubts, or the im- 
portance of his existence. Oh, the ease and 
the tranquillity and the content that there 
must be in never having questioned one's 
self! Never to have felt rush over one, par- 
alyzing the mind, inhibiting achievement, 
the sudden doubt of one's ability to do what 
one is attempting! Never to have passed 
[ 25 ] 



^he Book of Paris 

through the grim hours when the thought 
of all the men who have tried similarly and 
failed catches one like physical fear! For 
one who aims at anything creative there are 
periods of exhilaration, none of content. The 
exultant moments of swift accomplishment 
are dearly bought : for every such there are 
ten of bitter depression. Those who are be- 
set with lofty aspirations pass through days 
blacker than the man in the street and his 
little daughter will ever know. 

But they have been gone these ten min- 
utes, and I look out again on the throng that 
is drifting by. Like the Ancient Mariner, I 
may not choose my victims. I cannot delib- 
erately select this or that person as a theme 
to ponder. It is as if some one else chose for 
me, — some perverse fairy in whose choice 
there is neither reason nor plausibility. So 
this time I skip helplessly a man who might 
be a murderer, and another who is surely a 
musician, to feel my attention caught, illo- 
gically enough, by a couple who saunter past. 
[ 26] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

Theyare young, he less than twenty-eight,she 
barely twenty, and they are newly married. 
She clings to his arm with a pretty air of com- 
bined confidence in him and fear of all the rest 
of the world; and in the condescending be- 
nevolence with which he accepts her attitude 
there is the unmistakable mark of a husband 
destined to be happy, adored, and never found 
out. They are, I fancy, on their wedding- 
trip ; at any rate they are de province. That is 
clear from a dozen little things, but most of 
all from the young man's walk, a kind of 
loiter, in the course of which he turns indo- 
lently now and again to gaze slowly right 
and left. The Parisian, however leisurely his 
gait, has always the decisive air of one ac- 
customed to swift judgments; when he looks 
about him in the streets, it is with a rapid 
inclusive glance. My eyes meet those of the 
young woman for an instant ; she has pretty 
eyes set in an agreeable, rather character- 
less face, — at its best now for the glow of 
youth and happiness that suffuses it, — but 
[ 27 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

with nothing in them to hold me; more- 
over, she turns them away almost immedi- 
ately, and I fix my own on her husband. 

Caste distinctions are not sharply defined 
in this democratic country, where a family 
may with equal facility rise a class higher or 
sink one lower in a single generation; but 
he surely is of the upper bourgeoisie, probably 
the bourgeoisie of afiairs. The low, smooth 
forehead, placid with the placidity that comes 
from the total absence of abstract ideas, the 
firm mouth and the faint lines about it re- 
vealing notions that you would call convic- 
tions if you liked the type, prejudices if you 
did not, all indicate as much. It is a good 
class, a class of men who do, not of men who 
think; and, after all, — as any artist or au- 
thor will loftily admit, — there must be men 
to do the things that have to be done. But 
the man's life is planned; he knows the 
things he is to do ; andso it is with the woman 
that I feel the greater sympathy. She has, un- 
less I misjudge her, so pitifully little to inter- 
[ 28 ] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

est her in all the years that stretch ahead when 
her husband will have so much! I hope that 
she may bear many children, and I think I 
hope that there may be money-troubles in her 
husband's affairs, — not deadening, cramping 
troubles, but just enough so that existence 
may not be too easy for her, and, especially, 
enough so that the journey to Paris may not 
be repeated, though often projected. For so, 
seen in a mist of youth and love, and looked 
back at with a wistful tenderness, Paris will 
take on for her a beauty that, beautiful as it 
is, neither it nor any other city out of dreams 
has ever possessed. 

Afterwards such thoughts seem to me 
often, as they seem to you now, perhaps, ab- 
surdly arrogant and superior; and so indeed 
they would be if it were I, the / of little 
vices, petty virtues, and hampering preju- 
dices, who was thinking them. But it is 
not that/; for in this strange separation of 
one's self from the rest of life one seems 
to cast off for the time being the mortality 
[ 29] 



The Book of Paris 

of his nature and to swell suddenly from the 
atom, the infinitely small and unimportant 
part of the whole, to the colossus for whom 
all things exist. Poor impotent colossus, — 
colossus for himself alone ! That is the bit- 
terest reflection for me, — that I can do 
nothing, cannot change one thing of the 
many that seem so desperately to need 
changing ; can only think and think. And 
yet I know that if all at once the power of 
a God to reshape these people's lives, to 
"remould" them "nearer to the heart's 
desire," were given me, I should not dare 
so much as lift a finger. 

And this haggard brilliant creature who 
passes now, — not for her? 

Civilization is marching onward. Every- 
thing serves some noble purpose. " God 's 
in his heaven — all 's right with the world." 
No doubt. Meanwhile sit in my sidewalk 
cafe, look out at the woman-of-the-streets, 
and say it if you can. 

The horror of her is that she is not pit- 
[ 30] 



Sidewalk Cafes 

iful. In the hard mouth there is no expres- 
sion; in the cold eyes that wander restlessly 
from one to another of the men about her 
there is no emotion, — only the single dull 
question ; in the practised raising of the 
skirts there is no semblance of passion. She 
is scarcely more than an automaton now. 
Habits hold her to existence, but there is no 
life left. Even pain is but dully felt, I am 
sure, and pleasure scarcely at all. Nothing 
of the woman remains. Did I not say that 
this river too carried its corpses? 

But suddenly, in the stream pouring by me, 
individuals seem no longer to exist by them- 
selves. Bourgeois and prostitute and shop- 
keeper and the thousand others lose their 
identity, and I see them only as fragments 
of the whole swirling around together like 
dust-specks in a ray of sunlight. The ironic 
thought strikes me that each of these ap- 
pears to himself the centre of the confu- 
sion, and struggles and jostles his neighbors 
[ 31 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

in the endeavor to defeat the rest and 
achieve his own purposes. What, I wonder, 
can be the meaning in this which looks so 
meaningless? Is there indeed a meaning? 
What if it is not a plan, not even a plan 
gone wrong, but just no plan at all ? What 
if in all the years that we have hunted for 
the reason of things, there was simply no 
reason to find ? What if in all the centuries 
that we have prayed our contradictory 
prayers, there was No One to hear ? What 
if— 

Some one passing between the tables 
brushes my sleeve. I start painfully, like one 
waking from a dream, suddenly conscious 
that I too am part of life. I am no longer 
the colossus, — only the atom; and I am 
very tired. I glance down. My vermouth 
stands untouched on the table. I drink it 
hastily, and leaving beside the glass the few 
sous that pay for this hour of isolation, I step 
out into the stream, and become part of it, 
and am swept away. 



Along the ^lay 



/ choose my Home 



A 



:^. 









:Hr 



(r- 




:^ 



''"<^.-- 






Ill 

/ Choose My Home 




^"^^O-DAY," I said to myself de- 
h^M, cidedly, as I opened my eyes, " I 
k^TO must choose my home.'* 
^^^ It was the fault of the breeze, 
— the little breeze that crept in through my 
open bedroom window, scattering sunlight 
across the floor, and carrying a hundred 
early-morning sounds and perfumes, — the 
twittering of sparrows in the court, the fra- 
grance of spring flowers, and even the plain- 
tive chant of the chickweed-vendor in a 
distant street, crying his " Mouron pour les 
fetits oiseauxT All May was in the breeze. It 
set one tingling with the desire to do some- 
thing, but something pleasant, unpractical, 
inconsequent, not too definite, — and so, 
since choosing my home is the most beau- 
[ 35 ] 



The Book of Paris 

tifully useless of all my occupations, I settled 
on it at once. 

" Bon joiir^ Monsieur Claude y' said Eu- 
genie, entering with hot water; *^vous avez 
bien do7'miV 

^^ Bon jour, Eugenie ; tres bien, mercij' I re- 
plied. ^^ Aujourd'hui, Eughiieyje vais choisir 
une maison pour moij* I added firmly. 

*^ Vrai, Monsieur Claude?" said Eugenie 
sympathetically, but without surprise. It is 
impossible for me to surprise Eugenie. This 
is due partly to her having been born in 
Paris, — a quality as rare as beauty, — and 
partly to the fact that she is consumed with 
a devotion to me, which does not in the 
least prevent her from cheating me in buy- 
ing groceries, but which puts astonishment 
at anything I may say out of the question, 
as a kind of disloyalty. In reviewing my 
characteristics, I have never been able to dis- 
cover certainly what it is in me that appeals 
to Eugenie ; but the secret may be that, since 
I am unable to be impersonal with women 
[36] 



Street Venders 



l"\'ifclu'i \ \- 



u 




KuE 5r SumvfS 



/ Choose My Home 

of any class except those whom I disHke, 
she feels in the tone with which I speak 
to her a recognition of her sex. If Eugenie 
were a mistress, her affection would no 
doubt take the form of caresses; as she is 
a servant, she expends it on polishing my 
shoes when they do not need it, and some- 
times even when they do. Not, however, 
that my position is deficient in other than 
utilitarian pleasures. Eugenie is the only 
person who has ever considered me hand- 
some. It was a few evenings ago, while she 
stood patiently holding a boutonntere, and I 
was adjusting a tie, that I became aware of 
the delusion. 

" You will observe, Eugenie," I remarked, 
"a great difference in mirrors. Now this 
one," I said, with a vain endeavor to get 
near enough to judge of my success, " makes 
me appear almost good-looking, while in 
this," crossing the room to another, " I am 
really ugly ! " 

"A strange glass, indeed. Monsieur 
[ 37 ] 



The Book of Paris 

Claude," exclaimed Eugenie, with a sincer- 
ity which I should be the last to question, 
" to make you look ugly ! " 

Our early-morning conversations, when 
she has entered with hot water and shoes, 
and I am lying in that delicious state of 
profound meditation on nothing whatever 
that just precedes getting up, afford me un- 
failing amusement ; for Eugenie has a spon- 
taneous sense of humor rare in a woman, 
and with inimitable verve recounts how, by 
encouraging the boiilangere in the next street 
to relate her amours, she succeeded in pass- 
ing a demonetized two-franc piece — Napo- 
leon III uncrowned — which some one had 
dishonestly given me ; and repeats the pit- 
eous plaint of the coal-dealer's assistant over 
his inability to get himself white enough 
on Sunday to be accorded the kisses of his 
-promise^ and have anything of the day left. 
But on this particular morning the conversa- 
tion was serious. 

" In what quarter, Eugenie, should you 
[ 38 ] 



/ Choose My Home 

advise me to look for my house?" I in- 
quired anxiously. 

" Oh," said Eugenie, closing the window, 
"the quartier de I'Etoiie, Monsieur Claude. 
II 72 y a que ga de vraiment chic.'' 

"Good," I thought to myself, smiling. 

Eugenie is the only woman I have ever 
known in whom bad taste is consistent and 
unfailing. Others — many others — have it 
most of the time, but subject to annoy- 
ing and unexpected relapses ; with her it is 
always to be depended upon. Whenever I 
have impulsively bought a vase, of which on 
critical reflection I begin to have my doubts, 
I ask Eugenie for her opinion ; and if I feel 
from the tone of her praise that she really 
likes it, I give it away as a wedding present. 
It is only fair to myself to say that I have 
never acquired anything in Paris over which 
Eugenie grew genuinely enthusiastic. And 
so now, when she so confidently recom- 
mended the quartier de rEtoiky my doubts 
were confirmed, and I knew that I might 
[ 39] 



TA- Book of l\ir/s 

in all tr.iiu|uillitv omit it troni inv uaiuicr- 
ings. l-'\L"cpt tor the <.'h.nnps I'Mvscos aiui 
tho oitolc about the noble Aro dcTriomphc, 
that distriot, \\ ith its imposing houses and 
its enormous new hotels beloved ot my 
countrymen, has seemed to me, tor all its 
ostentation, rather characterless. I some- 
times amuse myself bv imagining what sort 
of person would tvpitv a house, or a street, 
or even a whole section of Paris, l-'or the 
quaj'tkr de TEtoik it would be the pompous 
man who enunciates banalities as though 
they were vital, newly discovered truths. 

I inhabit — perhaps vou should be told — 
a little apartment in Tassv, and shall proba- 
bly as long as I live, I'hat is why, on this 
sunny, intoxicating May morning, choosing 
n\\ home seenied the gayest, most harmo- 
niously frivolous and liirht-hearted thinor \ 
could do. That, too, was why I was to set 
about it so seriously. I have always been able 
to put niy best energy into the search for 
something which it \vas unnecessary to lind. 
[40] 



'The Seine at Noire Dame 



/ Choose My Home 

When I had dressed, and sat sipping my cof- 
fee, I was still deep in reflection, but when 
at last I set the cup down, my decision was 
taken. 

" I will go first of all," I said, " to the 
Boulevard Maillot." 

(Oh, Eugenie! Eugenie! Even though I 
rejected your suggestion, had it not insid- 
iously left me something of your taste for 
the fleshpots?) 

Outside every one was singing, — the co- 
ckers on their boxes, the boys wheeling deliv- 
ery-carts, the servants on their way to market. 
It was still early : the world that is too proud 
to sing in the street was not yet astir. Even 
my surly concierge, I remembered joyfully, 
had been emitting strange raucous sounds 
which I chose now to believe were song; 
and when a concierge sings! . . . 

Beneath the quay the Seine rippled dain- 
tily by, playing prettily with the reflections 
of its bridges, and sparkling in the wake of 
the little boats — the bateaux mouches — that 
[41 ] 



The Book of Paris 

flit swallow-like in great curves from stop- 
ping-point to stopping-point along it. Over 
everything, touching softly the glistening 
roofs of houses and the thousand chimney- 
tops, hung a delicately moistly blue sky, 
cloudless, but streaked with faint patches of 
vapor. 

** Le ciel est, pardessus le toit. 
Si bleu, si calme ! ' ' 

I sang to myself. Verses of Verlaine's are 
continually rising to one's lips here ; for of 
all the thousands who have felt the strange 
wistful appeal of Paris, he alone has been 
able to turn it into words. 

I could not bring myself to leave the river 
yet, and so strolled along it for a way, up 
toward the city proper. A strange way surely 
of going to the Boulevard Maillot. — No 
matter ! On this radiant haphazard morn- 
ing I would do nothing in the most direct 
fashion. 

On its hill ahead, and slightly to my 
left, rose the palace of the Trocadero, its two 
[42 ] 



/ choose My Home 

lofty towers stained pink in the sunlight. 
People shake their heads over the Troca- 
dero; and indeed, regarding it nearly, one 
finds little to say for it. It was built in a 
period of atrocious taste, of which it is, if 
the truth must be told, a fair example. Yet I, 
for one, should be sorry if it were gone; for 
in the distance its vulgarity fades from sight, 
and its huge dome and tall oriental minarets 
take on, especially in early morning or just 
at sunset, a certain massive charm. After all, 
as my friend the artist says, there is not much 
difference between good architecture and 
bad, from a little way off. Besides, unfor- 
tunate as it is, the Trocadero has not, even 
when seen close at hand, the kind of bad- 
ness that offends, possibly because its vast- 
ness is not in the least impressive. There 
is an apologetic air about it that makes one 
think of some harmless pathetic monster who 
should say sorrowfully, ** I know I 'm ugly, 
but I can't help it"; and that gives one an 
absurd desire to pet it. " Don't laugh," I said 
[43 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

to myself, when I had climbed up past the 
bronze animals in the garden that leads to 
it, and was crossing its enormous portico ; 
" Don't laugh : you might make it feel 
badly." 

Out into the big empty Place du Troca- 
dero, down the Avenue d'Eylau and the long 
rue des Belles Feuilles, to the Porte Dau- 
phine. I left the city by this gate and turned 
into the Allee des Fortifications, that skirts 
the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. From 
within the Bois came the soft patter of chil- 
dren's voices, the song of birds, and the fra- 
grance of acacias; and all, it seemed, were 
calling to me. 

" No ! No ! No ! " I said, laughing, " not 
to-day ! " 

I must have said it aloud, for a passer-by 
turned suddenly to look at me ; but there was 
only kindliness in his smile. It was May. 

The Boulevard Maillot, which is outside 
the city limits, runs along the Bois from the 
Porte Maillot clear to the river. It changes 
[44 ] 



/ Choose My Home 

its name, to be sure, at the Avenue de Madrid, 
where it turns sharply ; but I do not Hke its 
second name, and shall speak of it here, if 
you please, as though it had kept its initial 
one. For the first ten minutes of following 
it in its course away from the city gate, 
I regarded the boulevard with disapproval. 
There was no lure in the mediocrity of these 
smug dwellings, resembling unfortunately 
those that crowd the Newtons or other of 
the towns about Boston. Here lived the peo- 
ple who, in ordering a jewel or two sent them, 
would not be able to say " The Boulevard 
Maillot " without a slight compression of the 
lips or a touch of consciousness in the tone. 
I was considering taking a home among the 
houses where live those to whom the shop- 
keeper would of his own accord observe, 
" The Boulevard Maillot, doubtless. What 
number, if you please, monsieur? " As I con- 
tinued on my way, however, the houses drew 
slowly back from the street, and each seemed 
a little less banal than the one before, — to 
[45 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

have subtly more of an air of breeding : it 
was like the transformation scene in a palace 
of illusions, — until at last the acme was 
reached in a limitless succession of palaces 
set, among vine-covered oaks and cedars, 
deep in grounds that were screened from too 
complete a scrutiny by splendid flowering 
hedges, but in which, nevertheless, one 
could from the opposite side of the street, 
by standing on tip-toe, discern flower-beds, 
columns, and the greenest of green turf, with 
sometimes a gardener sprinkhng it. The 
white pillars of little arbors gleamed among 
the foliage. Everything here was ordered, 
faultless and serene, exhaling an agreeable 
aroma of riches. Only a young girl picking 
roses was needed to make of it a Royal 
Academy picture. 

I fell, I confess, under the spell; yet, though 
I Hngered pleasantly before many of these 
mansions, it was less in a liking for any par- 
ticular one among them, than in an appre- 
ciation of the idea they collectively expressed, 
[46] 



/ choose My Home 

— life freed from all petty concern with ex- 
istence, and simplified by a lavish systematic 
complexity (the only manner in which it 
can be honestly simplified to-day). Never to 
have to say to myself, " You can't afford this," 
" You '11 have to give up that " ; never to con- 
sider sadly that one's frock-coat is becoming 
worn ; to be robbed, doubtless, in a thousand 
fashions, but never to care ! Oh, decidedly, 
it was the only way of living ! And I could 
be trusted with it, too. My tastes were fixed; 
could wealth destroy my love of books, of 
pictures, and of music ? 

My fancy was loose now, and dragging me 
along frantically. Innumerable projects pre- 
sented themselves. I would eliminate ugli- 
ness from all about me ; I would make my 
home so beautiful that artists and authors 
and even musicians should forget their petty 
feuds in its suave atmosphere, and become 
personally the finer selves that they habitu- 
ally put only into their work. Each of my 
dinners should be a poem ; I could see the 
[47 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

table now, — and the whole room, — with 
the candle-light falling on old china and 
bringing out soft faded colors in the tapes- 
tries on the walls. The dining-room would 
be Gothic, I supposed, — or Renaissance. At 
any rate, the salon should be Louis XIII. But 
I would not furnish my house hastily ; many 
rooms would remain bare a long time. It 
would be folly to deny myself the joy of the 
slow accumulation in which each chair or 
cabinet represents a discovery. I remembered 
pieces of furniture seen recently. There had 
been an exquisite Louis XVI dressing-table 
in the window of a shop on the Quai Vol- 
taire. I hoped it had not been sold; it was 
just the thing for a — 

"Yes," said Fancy, "go on — for a bou- 
doir! Of course you'll have a wife. Every- 
body on the Boulevard Maillot has one." I 
stopped short. 

" A wife ! Are you sure ? " I asked. 

"Absolutely certain." 

A wife. I thought with a shiver of a dream 
[48] 



/ choose My Home 

I had recently had, in which I was being 
married, going through the formalities of 
the rite against my will, muttering " yes " 
where I wanted to shout " no," and recov- 
ering from my state of submissiveness only 
when the last guest had departed and I was 
left alone with my bride. 

"But," I had cried then, — and it did 
seem to me afterwards to have been a bit 
rude of me, — " I don't want to be married ! 
Can't you understand ? " (She really appeared 
not to.) "I want to be free! free!" — and 
so awoke. 

A wife! Why should she come now, to 
spoil everything? I would not give in at 
once. 

"But you see," I suggested, "I'd be dif- 
ferent from the others : I 'd be an eccentric." 

"Nonsense," said Fancy sternly. "If 
you 're going to live on the Boulevard 
Maillot, you must do as the Boulevard Mail- 
lot does." 

Duty ! Responsibility ! Concern for what 
[49] 



'The Book of Paris 

others might think ! — What a Pandora's box 
this imaginary helpmate was opening. In 
Passy I had suppressed duty ; I did only what 
I cared to do, and I rarely saw the people I 
disliked. Could it be that on the Boulevard 
Maillot one's liberty was less? A wife — 

" Why not ? " said Fancy coaxingly. " You 
would n't have to see her often. You would 
play with your friends and she with hers, and 
you'd have separate suites of apartments, — 
it would n't be bad. On pleasant mornings 
you 'd breakfast together in the garden. 
You'd get there first, and presently she 
would come delicately down the steps, in a 
soft trailing morning-gown " — 

I smiled in surrender. Morning-gowns 
were attractive. I was off again now, but 
with less exhilaration, and more cautiously, 
like a rider who has had a bad fall. I would 
have horses, I thought, and an automobile, 
— one automobile, what was I thinking 
of? — two, even three, perhaps. But this 
was the end. 

[ 50] 



A Parisienne 




-*«< ■/3»SWr«B?t'( 



/ choose My Home 

"It's time you left the Boulevard Mail- 
lot," I said sternly to myself. "You are be- 
coming too extravagant." 

One must preserve plausibility even in the 
search for the impossible. Besides, although 
to correct one's self for actual faults is so dis- 
agreeable an occupation that no wise man 
would spend a moment's time on it, to re- 
prove one's self for sins that are only of the 
imagination is an inexhaustible pleasure. 
There is no bitterness, and the virtuous glow 
is quite as warm as though the offence had 
been real. So now it was with genuine relish 
that I made up my mind to do penance, — 
particularly as the penance meant merely a 
journey to Montmartre. The truly tolerant 
man is not the man who is lenient toward 
the faults of others, but he who is lenient 
toward his own; he has so much more to 
forgive. But when I had taken the little 
tramway of the Val d'Or to the Porte Mail- 
lot, had descended into the musty depths of 
the Metro, and was being whirled noisily 
[ 51 ] 



The Book of Paris 

through the dim tunnels beneath Paris, I 
wondered whether, after all, it was not the 
thought of the wife that had driven me from 
the Boulevard Maillot. 

Marriage seems to me an ignominious in- 
stitution. As I steer out among the matri- 
monial rocks, that beset one's early progress, 
toward the open sea of recognized bache- 
lordom, where there is only an occasional 
clearly seen reef, easy to avoid for one with 
skill enough to get so far, I feel an increasing 
exultation. There are men who look upon 
the fact of having taken a wife with pride, as 
though they had achieved something diffi- 
cult. Poor fools, not to see that any one — 
be he as ill-favored as Cerberus or as dull as a 
maxim of Sir John Lubbock's — can marry, 
and that they have fallen dupe to Nature ! 
But I know her now, the jade, for what she 
is, — wily, unscrupulous, deceitful, having at 
heart a single end, the perpetuation of the 
race, to reach which she will employ no 
matter what means. The individual cares 
[ 52 ] 



/ Choose My Home 

nothing for the race, and Nature cares no- 
thing for the individual, except as he forms 
part of it. But she needs him, and so she sets 
her lying snares, into one of which he rushes, 
silly dreamer, thinking it the gate to para- 
dise, only to find himself a slave. For Nature 
is pitiless in her unconcern for the man once 
caught. He must serve her purpose now ; 
illusions are no longer necessary. 

The mystery of love, feminine charm, the 
dream of an embodied ideal, — they appeal 
to me too, almost irresistibly at times; but 
I know them for the bait they are, and, aware 
of the steel springs beneath, find somehow 
strength to turn aside. I may be trapped one 
day, but it will at least be with my eyes open, 
and knowing that I am being deceived. 

There is one other lure which I have not 
yet felt, but which Nature will surely hold 
out to me when I have grown a little older, 
— for she never gives any one up, — the 
vision of comfort, domesticity, a fireside, and 
slippers. It is the most dangerous of all ; for 
[ 53 ] 



The Book of Paris 

while the rest were beautiful lies, this has a 
foundation of truth. It is the basest, too. 
The young man's search for a mate in whom 
shall be nothing lower than what is finest in 
himself, the endeavor to grasp absolute per- 
fection ;• however Utopian and pre-doomed to 
failure such attempts, they are noble dreams ; 
but the desire for comfort is the desire for 
mediocrity, which lurks somewhere in ail 
of us, — except, perhaps, in poets. Comfort 
degrades. He who has succumbed to its tran- 
quil charm is forever lost to ideas and to 
creative achievement. The melancholy re- 
flection is that he did not need to be. The 
opposite of commonplace is not talented, but 
worth while; and whoever is conscious of gen- 
eral ideas, no matter how primitive or con- 
fused, is worth while. No one is common- 
place at twenty ; no one need be at forty-five. 
Mediocrity is not a lack of distinction, but 
a state of mind. May heaven preserve us all 
from the lotos-flower ! Men are sometimes 
to be found, great enough to undergo mar- 
[ 54] 



/ choose My Home 

riage — even a happy marriage — without 
degeneration ; but, considering myself, I 
shake my head. As the manuals of physi- 
ology that we studied in the grammar-school 
used to say about the use of alcohol : "Since 
the evil results are so certain and the good 
so problematic, surely the wisest course is to 
abstain altogether." Thus I reflected in the 
Paris subway, as the electric train carried 
me swiftly away from the Boulevard Mail- 
lot and the home that grew every moment 
less to my taste. 

Pigalle! I left the car, ascended a musty 
staircase, pushed open a door, and stood, 
just outside, blinking in the sudden light. 
The Metro, like most other useful contriv- 
ances, is disagreeable; but it has its merits. 
There is, after all, something enchanted and 
Arabian about it. If I had come to Mont- 
martre from the Boulevard Maillot by tram, 
by bus, or on foot, the alteration in my sur- 
roundings would have taken place so grad- 
ually that the final contrast would have been 
[ 55 ] 



Tbi' Book (f Paris 

iIuIKhI; as it was, hail tlic gcnic ot the rin<i; 
snalchcil inr up aiul set inc ilow n here, the 
chani^e e(>iilil not lia\ e heen sliarper o\- more 
al>si>hite. iMie HoiHevanl MailK>t hail heen 
dignilieil, hamlsoine, aiul soinew liat too well- 
hreil ; the IMaee Pigalle was careless, ugly, 
ami not \Nell-hreil at all. The Hoiilevard 
Maillot hail hreatheil a genteel repression; 
the riaee Pii'^alle, though it was iloing no- 
thing out ot the way now, laeked decorum, 
like a ehorus-girl in repose. 

1 stood lor a moment deliheratin;'; where 
to i',o tirst, until thethoughtol howwonder- 
lul Paris must appear this morning Irom the 
Hutte led me tniallv into the rue des Mar- 
tyrs, and so onw ard, until 1 eame to the toot 
ot the long sueeessi\e (lights ot steps that 
lead to the crest ol the hill on w hich rises 
the Hasilica oi the Sacre C^irur. Tausing here 
to look up, I noted \yith appreciation the 
w ay the dila[Mdated houses leaned, in all the 
picturesqueness ot squalor, oyer the dingy 
stairs. 0\\ one ot the landings lar aboye iiie, 
L 30 1 



/ (Choose My Home 

and Jialf in ;Jiud(jw, liuii in a pool of sun- 
lightthat had fallen, a.slantinggoldcnbhower, 
from a gap in tlic rickety roofs of tenements, 
a market-w(;ir)an had paused for breatli in 
her sh^vv descent. I f er ample skirts were 
pinned up, and her extended left arm })ressed 
against her hip a hasket of yellfjw cjarrots and 
dusty red beets. A crims(jn handkerchief was 
tied about her head. She might have been 
an Italian of the south, and this a street 
in Naples, dating from the Middle Ages. So 
pervasive seemed the mellow spirit of age in 
this curious thoroughfare, that the phrases 
"old houses" and "ancient stairs" passed 
agreeably through nwj mind. 

Then suddenly I became aware — not 
through anything false ur mejfjch-amatic in 
the scene, but throng}) an unf(M"tunate ac- 
quaintance with the historical geography of 
Paris — that I was being deceived: the effect 
of antiquity in my surroundings was an illu- 
sion. Wiixi:., no longer ago than the forties, 
were little suburban homes; pleasant gardens 
[ 57 1 



The Book of Paris 

covered the slopes of this hill, and attractive 
cottages crowned it. This was the Mont- 
rouge of fifty years ago. As I climbed the 
stairs I looked critically from right to left 
for some flaw in the setting, for the absence 
of some touch that only an accumulation 
of centuries could give; but in vain. The 
atmosphere of extreme age that seemed 
to hang over these houses, built within the 
memory of many a man, was as subtle and 
convincing as that one feels in Amalfi, and 
I found myself driven to the conclusion that 
the mysterious satisfying impression of an- 
tiquity is aroused not by antiquity itself but 
by a certain arrangement of material. Dilap- 
idation alone will not bring it (there were, 
I remembered, streets as decayed and tum- 
ble-down as this in Chicago, and heaven 
knows there was no glamour of antiquity 
about them !), but dilapidation must enter in. 
The effect of age obtained by this narrow 
street of stairs up which I climbed was purely 
fortuitous. Until now the requisite arrange- 
[ 58 ] 



/ choose My Home 

ment had been unconscious, a matter of 
chance; but it need not be. 

What a discovery, I thought, I had made 
for my country ! With our initiative, what 
might we not do, once the laws that must 
be followed to produce the impression of 
antiquity were thoroughly understood ? We 
would build dilapidated cities in New York 
State, on the shores of Lake Michigan, or — 
yes — even in Kansas, beside which Athens 
(Greece) would seem modern, and Venice 
but a village of yesterday. Perugia and 
Avignon would be rarely visited then ; in- 
stead, tourists from all over the world would 
throng to America, to admire reverently, 
and to scribble their names in pencil on the 
carefully decaying stones of these more con- 
vincingly ancient cities. With which patri- 
otic vision I reached the top of the steps. 

I would not look down at once, but 

walked onward, keeping my eyes averted, 

saving my sensations as a child saves its 

choicest sweets, until I reached the platform 

[ 59] 



"The Book of Paris 

before the Basilica. Then only I turned to 
gaze down at the city that unrolled itself 
beneath me. The first thing I remarked was 
that, for all the bright May sunshine, a haze 
hung over Paris, — not a haze that dulled 
and concealed, but a delicate luminous pre- 
sence that interpreted and idealized, bring- 
ing out what was beautiful and hiding what 
was ugly in everything it touched, drawing 
something of the warm softness of the spring 
sky down about the city, vaguely full of dis- 
seminate color, and as little to be deplored 
as the mist in a picture of Carriere's. We in 
America — in those parts of it, at least, with 
which I am familiar — have these warm, 
radiant hazes only in autumn ; but Paris is 
seldom without them. It is they, perhaps, 
together with the pale mystery of the Pari- 
sian sky, that give her that subtlety of beauty 
which even Florence lacks. 

My eyes wandered over the spectacle be- 
neath me : there were the Madeleine and 
the Bourse and the Porte Saint-Denis; there 
[60] 



A Little Street near Boulevard St. Germain 




"V I 



/ choose My Home 

in the middle distance was the river, only a 
curving thread of light now ; and there be- 
yond it was the Church of Saint-Germain- 
des-Pres, and, scarcely seen, the two towers 
of Saint-Sulpice. I laughed to myself in joy 
over the unreality of it all. It did not seem 
a city of stone and mortar, but the setting 
for a play; one would have said the third act 
of "Louise." 

"How strange!" I thought, as I stood 
leaning over the parapet and picking out the 
tiny effigies of familiar monuments in the 
scene below, " that by climbing a few stairs 
I can make the massive Opera shrink to a 
toy that I might put in my pocket, and the 
great Louvre itself dwindle to the size of a 
child's house of blocks ! " 

Then suddenly all the clocks of Paris be- 
gan striking noon, the little cannon boomed 
faintly from the Eiffel Tower, and I became 
swiftly conscious of being hungry. I turned 
away and walked briskly back in the di- 
rection I had come, without so much as 
[6i ] 



The Book of Paris 

ascending the few extra steps to the BasiHca 
of the Sacre Cceur. 

"There 's no use going in," I assured my- 
self. " I 've seen it before, and it's Byzantine 
without being extravagant, and Romanesque 
without being bare, and it 's simple and har- 
monious ; but its excellence is too conscious 
to inspire so much as a suggestion of the 
awe and the wonder that we feel in the 
most imperfect church of the Middle Ages. 
We can do many things to-day better than 
they have been done before, but we are 
wrong to build churches : for to build them 
nobly the deep reverence that is the result 
of passionate faith is required, and there is 
no such faith left in the world, — at least not 
in men intelligent enough to become archi- 
tects." 

Coward! Hypocrite! The constant pose 
of being finer than one is, is a necessary and 
admirable condition of one's relations with 
others ; but it becomes shameful maintained 
with one's self. Why could I not have said: 



/ Choose My Home 

"No, I will not go in, because I am hungry, 
and there is not a church in Paris I would 
go to see when I am hungry except the 
Sainte-Chapelle, and that not if I was very 
hungry"? 

Oh, for a poet great enough to convince 
us of the nobility and the glory of eating 
when we are really hungry ! We reserve the 
splendor of our verse for love ; but there is 
not half the high satisfaction in being in love 
that there is in dining well after a hard gallop 
over country roads. I know, for I have tried 
both. Eating, however, is habitual, good for 
us, and indispensable, while love is not; and 
we are all agreed that beauty is to be found 
only in what is superfluous and harmful. 
Poets have sometimes touched on the sub- 
ject, but euphemistically, as though eating 
were something gross that must in art be 
treated delicately, like an immoral theme in 
a London play. Keats, you remember, writes 
of "candied apple, quince and plum, and 
gourd with jellies . . . and lucent syrops 
[63 ] 



The Book of Paris 

tinct with cinnamon . . . manna and dates 
. . . spiced dainties." I am not sure as to 
manna, but the rest are all very bad for the 
digestion. Perhaps it is because it is the 
worst thing known for the digestion, that 
we unite in considering love so superlatively 
poetic. 

Arrived for the second time at the Place 
Pigalle, I entered the cabaret known as the 
Rat Mort. I was familiar with it already as 
(in its downstairs room) the least insincere 
of these restaurants de nuit^ and liked it in an 
unenthusiastic way for the attitude of cynical 
carelessness and irresponsibility that it ex- 
pressed. I had found it at midnight as good 
a place to talk, for friends intimate enough 
to say whatever came into their heads with- 
out concern for what that might be, as ex- 
isted in Montmartre. But I had never seen 
it by daylight, and I was interested in dis- 
covering to what depths of reality a boite 
which held so little of illusion at three in 
the morning could sink at noon. So I made 
[64 ] 



Au ''Rat Morr 



/ Choose My Home 

my way in, through a babble of voices and 
the composite odor of many dishes, toward 
an unoccupied section of the red-plush sofa 
that bounds the little room, and there, sit- 
ting down before one of the little rectangu- 
lar marble-topped tables to a table d' bote lun- 
cheon at two francs fifty, looked about in 
mild curiosity. 

Opposite me, beside the partition which 
divides the room in two, stood the upright 
piano which by night is never silent. But it 
was closed now and at peace, and the chair 
belonging to the rest of the orchestra had 
been pushed back against the wall. And, 
really, when that is said, all is said. The res- 
taurant was full, or nearly so, but the certain 
coarse charm that one felt in it during the 
hours between midnight and dawn was gone 
now, — gone utterly; only the vulgarity was 
left. The faces clustered about the tables 
were no longer units making up a whole that 
somehow pleased me, but just faces, sordid, 
dull, often grossly marked with the plain 
[65 ] 



T^he Book of Paris 

signs of vicious living. It is probable that 
many of the men were artists ; but I was not 
a schoolgirl to thrill at the mere word, and 
for most of these the word alone would have 
an existence. Montmartre is full of cynical 
daubers, for whom art is not a high calling 
to be wrestled with Jacob-like, and so sub- 
dued to a noble slavery, but a name to cover 
andexcusetheirvicesand the vagaries of their 
indolent lives. Some are rates, — the rates 
who had only a spark of talent and not per- 
sistence enough to keep even that alive, who 
failed miserably as soon as they put brush to 
canvas, and about whose failure there is no- 
thing splendid; but the greater number are 
impostors, men of no ability, disguising their 
lack of the technique that only a long drudg- 
ery, of which they were morally incapable, 
could have given them, as a breaking away 
from sterile academic forms; taking up with 
each successive new school of extremists 
in painting ; and doing, in the intervals of 
leisure that their amusements leave them. 



/ choose My Home 

compositionless monstrosities of color that 
they call the "New Art" and hang in the 
Salon des Independants (where there is no 
jury). 

I do not assert that there are not true 
artists in Montmartre, young men struggling 
toward an honest, sane expression of them- 
selves that, when achieved, will some day 
mean recognition and fame, — only that 
there are rather more counterfeits here than 
elsewhere. But as I looked about me now, 
I could see none who might be the genuine. 
Here were caricatures enough: hair worn 
long, baggy velveteen trousers, a haughty 
shabbiness, — all the traditional symbols of 
art were present, but displayed with such a 
lack of enthusiasm, such a jaded effrontery, 
so clear a consciousness of their being only 
a make-up, that they were not even amus- 
ing. I think I had never felt so oppressive 
an atmosphere of disillusionment. And it 
came to me, with a sharp scorn of myself 
for having been so easily duped, how super- 
[67] 



The Book of Paris 

iicial was the glamour this place held at night. 
I have touched the truth already ; — the piano 
was closed now, and the chair belonging to 
the rest of the orchestra had been pushed 
back against the wall. 

As I sat over my excellent luncheon at 
two-francs-fifty, I meditated on the delusion 
of bohemianism. If bohemianism is taken 
to mean the ignoring of useless conventions, 
then every man with mind enough to have 
a philosophy of life is bohemian, the true 
aristocrat as much as the needy author, — 
perhaps even more satisfactorily so: for the 
aristocrat discards only those dull and anti- 
quated forms that clog the daily flow of ex- 
istence, retaining the many that render it 
easier and pleasanter, while the author, less 
civilized, is apt to discard good and bad alike. 
If this were all bohemianism meant, who 
would not be a bohemian ? But so moderate 
a conception of the word is far from the 
sense in which it is usually taken, and I sug- 
gest it only because there is no name for 
[68 ] 



On He de la Cite 



"-::'5r-::^^?5;s:'^^5EgFSS5^*TC^ 




/ Choose My Home 

this state of mind, and because it is what I 
should like bohemianism to mean. 

Bohemianism, however, as it is attempted 
by young artists, or more perfectly conceived 
by the Philistine (who is at bottom the 
most sentimental of creatures), stands vaguely 
for a radiant manner of life, the concomi- 
tants of which are poverty, ideals, ambitions, 
and an ignorance of money entailing a cer- 
tain pleasant dishonesty in dealing with shop- 
keepers. The word has to the popular mind 
a kind of enchantment; it stands for what 
is left of romance. An existence fulfilling 
these requirements seems to us, for those 
fortunate ones who can lead it, an emanci- 
pation from weary formalities and rules of 
conduct. 

Error ! Error ! Error ! There is no such 
thing as liberty. You can free yourself from 
one set of laws only by establishing another. 
Bohemianism is an artificial state. The bo- 
hemian need not be logical; no, but he must 
be illogical. He is not obliged to think of 
[69] 



The Book of Paris 

money; but he is obliged by all the rules of 
the order not to think of it. Three or four 
boys live in common, and every one does 
what he pleases ; but this is because the 
others know beforehand what he will do, — 
or, at least, what he will not do. I remem- 
ber to have passed an evening once in the 
studio of a woman in "the Quarter," and to 
have asked, with no intent to offend, where 
I might put the ashes of my cigarette. 

" Oh," she said reproachfully, " throw 
them on the floor, of course! We're bohe- 
mian, you know." 

And I felt suddenly that my manners had 
been deficient, and that conventions here 
were, for being inverted, no less rigorous 
than in a fashionable apartment at Neuilly. 
The woman was, of course, a counterfeit 
bohemian, but it is in caricatures that one 
most readily sees the truth. 

I do not assert that bohemianism does not 
exist; I think, indeed, that it does some- 
times, very delightfully. But I do assert that, 
[ 70] 



/ Choose My Home 

whether attained or only played at, it is an 
artificial state. And, after all, even at its best, 
what charm has bohemianism but the charm 
of friendship ? That a group of light-hearted 
young men should live in common, reliev- 
ing the temporary poverty of one, or profiting 
by the prosperity of another, of their num- 
ber, — this is external, merely an expression 
of the loyal, affectionate intimacy that unites 
them. In every quarter of the world, I am 
sure, there are little circles of friends whose 
outlook on life is as buoyant, and whose de- 
votion to one another as warm and generous. 
Is there any less charm in their relations 
because they do not live in common, are 
not obliged to share one another's belong- 
ings, and happen not to be poor? Popularly, 
yes. A certain mist of romance envelops 
friendship only when it has these accompa- 
niments. 

It was in searching my mind for the oc- 
casion of so curious a paradox that I came, 
as I thought, to an understanding of the true 
[71 ] 



The Book of Paris 

nature of bohemianism. Until now I had 
been groping, aware that I had not reached 
the heart of the subject ; but now I under- 
stood: bohemianism was a Hterary ideal. The 
word '* romance " should have given me the 
clue before; for romance is always literary. 
In American cities romance is popularly 
supposed to exist in the country, because the 
inhabitants of the cities have seen "The Old 
Homestead" or read "David Harum." In 
the North romance is supposed to exist in 
the South, because northerners have read 
"Colonel Carter" or seen "In Old Ken- 
tucky." So with bohemianism : there is a 
halo about its hand-to-mouth existence, be- 
cause we have read of it in the glowing pages 
of Murger's " La Vie de Boheme" ; there is 
a splendor in its poverty, because we have 
seen it transfigured in Puccini's opera. And 
those who have not seen or read fall easily 
into the mood of those who have. The pov- 
erty of bohemianism as it is dreamed of is 
a literary poverty, its haphazard existence a 
[ 72] 



/ choose My Home 

literary one. It is of these delusions that the 
cult is made; for friendship and optimism, 
— all that is real, all that gives a charm to 
actual bohemianism, — there is no enthusi- 
asm. 

I have a friend v^^ho objects to " La Vie 
de Boheme" as it is produced at the Opera 
Comique, because, he says, there is too 
much ostentation in the poverty, too much 
luxury in the squalor. He is wrong. There 
should be luxury and ostentation. This bo- 
hemianism is literary. There is no glamour 
about real poverty; it is bitter and hard to 
endure. The close common existence, in a 
two-room apartment or a studio, of three or 
four young men honestly striving to achieve 
something creative, is cramping to each : 
for each is an individualist, or this is not true 
bohemianism. Those families are the hap- 
piest, and the only ones with an esprit de 
corps, in which the right of each member 
to be alone when he pleases, and to have 
unquestioned his separate interests, is con- 
[ 73 ] 



I be Hook of Pciris 

ccdc\l. No IricMuls c';in 1h' const.inllv to- 
gether day litter tl.i\' w itlu>ut uiuler!;\>ini; ii 
revulsion ot teelirig toward one another; and 
X\\c closer the intiniaey the sharper the reac- 
tion, rile pressure ot personali(\' is deaden- 
\\\i\ .\\\A e\.is[>eratini;. It may he i>ne reasi>n 
tor the greater prevahMiee ot w ite nuirilers 
among the poor than amon;'; the rieh. No, 
in aetual hoiienuanisni, Iriendshij") anil c>p- 
tiniisni \\<.^ not gain an adtleil lustre troni the 
peculiar c'onditic^ns under w Inch the\' exist, 
but shine in s[>ite v>t them, ^he^• alone are 
gennineh' heautitul; the charm ot all the 
rest is iietion, —-</{• la litter aturc. 

The word "disillnsionn^ent" no longer 
means simply haying got rid ot illusii>ns, hut 
stands to-day tor the tired, didl, and unen- 
thusiastic state ot miuil ett one w ho \yith his 
illusions has lost his taith and his interest. 
And how much ilrsdlusionment is caused hy 
the attempt to a{iply literar\' ideals to lite ! 
That romantic hoys and girls should contc 
to Paris expecting to tnul Mimis and Ru- 

^ I :4 1 



/ choose My Home 

dolphes and Musettes in Montmartre or the 
Quartier Latin, — this is crude, of course: it 
is like looking for Puss-in-Boots or the Jab- 
berwock; but it is symbolic of what we are 
all continually doing, even when we know 
better. Our minds are stocked with literary 
ideals that we are forever trying to apply to 
life. Literary friendship, literary love, lit- 
erary heroes and villains, — we go hunting 
them up and down; and when we have 
found only real friendship, which is too re- 
served, and real love, which is too human, 
and neither heroes nor villains anywhere, 
what can result but disillusionment, unless 
we have the faculty of self-deceit to con- 
vince us that what we have found is what 
we sought, or intervals of sanity when we 
see with amusement the absurdity of such a 
quest, and fall back on our true ideals ? For 
true ideals do not fail one. We never com- 
pletely realize them, but following them 
intermittently, as most of us do in these 
lucid periods, we feel reality grow con- 
[ 75 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

stantly richer and more significant of them. 
The man of forty sees touches of beauty 
everywhere that he could not have seen at 
twenty. 

Reflecting now in one of these lapses 
from literature, I saw that it was surely not 
at Montmartre I should find my home. A 
room or two in a creaking garret with a 
view of roofs and chimney-pots ; weeks of 
fasting, starred occasionally by nights of riot- 
ous luxury; random mistresses lightly taken 
and as lightly dropped, — I enumerated for 
the sake of thoroughness the conditions of 
the life; but I faced them as facts, and they 
held no enchantment. I might put these 
things and myself into a book, and make, if 
I did it well enough, a very pretty unorigi- 
nal story; but just as surely as the / of the 
book would be a fictional, adapted, expur- 
gated /, so surely would these things be not 
themselves but their literary counterparts. 
As reality, they were unattractive, vulgar 
and a trifle sordid. There may sometimes 
[ 1^\ 



/ choose My Home 

be little poetry in wealth ; there is none 
in poverty. 

When I had left the restaurant, I wandered 
for conscience' sake a little longer through 
these shabby streets, but perfunctorily; and 
at the Place Clichy I climbed to the imperiale 
of one of the motor-buses that ply between 
that square and the Odeon. To the amateur 
of sensations these new engines that tear 
shrieking through once tranquil little streets, 
scattering passers-by frantically to left and 
right, and leaving behind them a universal 
sense of miraculous escape from death, are a 
joy, combining the excitement of a perilous 
pastime with the advantage of usefulness ; but 
to the philosopher they are too perturbing. 
"Now, there is a house," he says to himself, 
" that is an excellent example of its epoch. 
It would be interesting to note whether 
over the door — "; but the house is gone. 
" Strange that for so many years that monu- 
ment should have remained — " ; but a sharp 
turning of a corner throws him panting 
[77] 



"The Book of Paris 

against the rail of safety, and his thought is 
forever lost to the world. 

A thousand objects of interest flashed 
swiftly into sight and as swiftly disappeared 
as we rushed noisily down the hill from 
Montmartre ; but though I looked back re- 
gretfully, I kept my seat. A man whose mind 
is both inconsequential and reflective must 
sometimes take motor-buses in Paris, or he 
would never get anywhere. A moment's stop 
on the Boulevard des Italiens and we swept 
into the rue de Richelieu, formerly a peace- 
ful meditative street, rendered intolerable and 
ridiculous now by the tumultuous passage of 
these new monsters. The street has the air 
of a venerable white-haired man gone sud- 
denly and boisterously mad. All that should 
normally have lent it dignity, — the vast Na- 
tional Library Building, the allegorical Fon- 
taine de Richelieu, — only serves to heighten 
its present absurdity. Alone the statue of Mo- 
liere seems still appropriate. The great hu- 
morist would have loved this incongruity of 
[ 78] 



Old Passage^ Palais Royal 



/ choose My Home 

aspect and behavior ; while as to the memo- 
ries so rudely disregarded, he always cared 
less for such things than for living humanity ; 
and the rue de Richelieu is very human. 

At the farthest corner of the Palais Royal 
we paused for an instant — if one may call 
this panting, roaring, vibrating absence of 
motion a pause — to permit a new inrush of 
passengers, and I let my eyes wander plea- 
santly over the familiar unpretentious archi- 
tecture of the Comedie Fran^aise. For some 
years already the preeminence of this oldest 
among Parisian play-houses has been but a 
tradition. So far as I am concerned, there are 
at least four other theatres I had rather fre- 
quent than the Francaise, which, under the 
too civilized academic direction of Monsieur 
Claretie, has become a splendid mausoleum 
of art, where a glacial perfection of detail in 
acting has supplanted the genuine portrayal 
of emotions, and where one may go to see 
an admirable modern drama and come away, 
as I did from the "Amoureuse" of George 
[ 79] 



The Book of Paris 

de Porto-Riche, convinced of having wit- 
nessed a very stupid piece. But so much of 
its splendid past still clings about the Come- 
die Francaise that one is unable to gaze at it 
without a real affection. 

I dropped my eyes, as the bus lurched for- 
ward again, to the graceful statue of de 
Musset and his muse that occupies the corner 
in front of the theatre. " It is very delicate 
and beautiful," I reflected, " but with rather 
too personal and intimate a charm for its situ- 
ation. Set thus in a public square it is like a 
Mozart quartet . . . played- in a vast . . . concert-hall." 

" There ! " I said, shaking my fist at the 
motor-bus, — shaking it figuratively, that is 
to say ; actually I was clinging with both 
hands to the seat, — " I did finish that thought 
in spite of you ! " But the motor-bus only 
rattled callously on, into the noble court of 
the Louvre, out again on the other side, and 
across the Seine by the Pont du Carrousel to 
the Quai Voltaire. Here, having somehow 
descended the perilous narrow stairs from 
[80] 



/ choose My Home 

the imperiale to the ground, I left the bus — 
which promptly roared itself, with a final 
diminuendo of hoots, out of my life — and 
turned by the rue des Saints-Peres and the 
rue de Verneuil into the old and aristocratic 
quarter known as the Faubourg Saint-Ger- 
main. 

One of the most delightful characteristics 
of Paris is the great variety it offers. Most 
cities are divided into sections that are re- 
spectively rich or poor, banal or brilliant, 
picturesque or dull ; but in Paris every quar- 
tier has its peculiar individuality, which no 
external resemblance of conformation or 
architecture can make it share with another. 
The district of narrow involved streets about 
the Pantheon is as different in character from 
the He de la Cite, as the He de la Cite from the 
Boulevard des Italiens, and the Boulevard des 
Italiens as different from the Boulevard Se- 
bastopol as any one of them is from the 
Champs Elysees. Among them all the most 
distinctively individual is the Faubourg Saint- 
[ 8i ] 



The Book of Paris 

Germain. It seems, like Poe's " House of 
Usher," to have a physical atmosphere of its 
own with which the wanderer in the quarter 
feels himself enveloped and penetrated, as 
with dampness or cold. There had been no 
reverence in my admiration for the luxury 
of the Boulevard Maillot, no deference in 
my attitude toward the poverty of Montmar- 
tre ; but here I felt suddenly humbled and 
inferior. I despised myself for the sensation, 
but through no effort of w^ill or reason could 
I throw it off. I was like the honest citizen 
in the galleries of Versailles, w^ho keeps on 
his hat and hums an air in an attempt to look 
at ease, but who grows with every step more 
painfully conscious of being out of place. 
The silent austerity of the rue de Lille and 
the rue de Verneuil held for me a profounder 
impression of age than the street of steps at 
Montmartre ; for here the impression was 
not, as there, dependent on the real or seem- 
ing antiquity of the houses, but on the past 
that, even if they had been built only a few 

[ S2 ] 



Court of the Louvre 



£^^ 

:*"! 



V 



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i'5 






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^^W 


^ 




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-1?-i 


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\4r 


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Uj^ 









> $>s 



kA*^ 



[t-^ J 









w-^-"** 

^X;- 



%l 






8? ■ 



u r-M's 



/ choose My Home 

years ago, — as some of them doubtless were, 
— they symbolized ; a past splendid but crush- 
ing, intoxicating but hopelessly aloof. A child 
reading a fairy-tale becomes the prince, a 
man reconstructing in his fancy scenes from 
a vanished epoch of history sees himself an 
actor in them ; yet, though I pictured to my- 
self, so vividly that my heart beat faster, this 
quarter as it must have been a century and a 
half ago : the gardens that swept then from 
the houses clear to the river, and how they 
would have looked on the afternoon of some 
forgotten May, filled with idle lords and 
gracious ladies, — the Court being perhaps at 
Paris for a few days, — I could not imagine 
myself a part of the gay rout, but only an out- 
sider pressing my forehead hungrily against 
a grating in the effort to get a glimpse of the 
Pompadour, and struggling for my place 
among the canaille who fought together, 
hummed snatches of uncomplimentary songs 
apropos of the king's having taken a mistress 
who was born a bourgeoise^ and were beaten 
[ 83 ] 



The Book of Paris 

away from time to time by contemptuous 
lackeys. It was the same with the present. 
In my search for a home the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain was the only quarter in Paris to the 
life of which I could not even fancy myself 
as belonging. Strange how insurmountable 
seem the barriers of caste which men them- 
selves set up, and how much more insignifi- 
cant we feel before the artificial superiority 
of aristocracy than before the real superior- 
ity of genius ! I could unblushingly imagine 
meeting Shakespeare, yet I could not project 
myself mentally into either the past or the 
present of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. 

The thought of its sombre present held 
me, however, as I walked along the gray 
silent streets where my footsteps resounded 
as in a corridor. I knew that the walled-in, 
imposing exterior of every other one of 
these mansions was like the expressionless 
face of the proud man who is suffering. 
Behind the heavy doors there would be bare 
lofty salons, cold even in summer, only one 
[84] ■ 



/ Choose My Home 

of which would there be any attempt to heat 
— and that but scantily with a meagre care- 
ful fire — in winter. The life within would 
be very simple and not without its charm; 
for in these houses the privileges which 
under the old regime were accepted as a 
matter of course, have become, now that 
they are irrevocably lost, passionate tenets of 
faith. Apart from that degenerate fortune- 
hunting fraction by which alone we Ameri- 
cans know the titled classes of France, — 
but which one need not consider, since it al- 
most invariably dies out in the generation 
following the one that sees its decay, — the 
remnant of the old nobility in Paris lives 
with a rigorous simplicity of manners un- 
discoverable elsewhere. Things have been 
turned topsy-turvy in more ways than one. 
This caste, which in the eighteenth cen- 
tury was composed of skeptics crediting no- 
thing and accepting the conventions of 
Catholicism off-hand merely as among the 
polite forms to which a gentleman must 
[ 85 ] 



The Book of Paris 

acquiesce, is in the twentieth century the 
only one with an earnest hiith in reHgion ; 
whereas the great middle class, which then 
accepted all it was told, now (this is true of 
Paris, not of the provinces) believes in no- 
thing. The bourgeoisie has lost convictions; 
the aristocracy has o-ained them. Behind the 
walls of the residences in the rue Saint 
Dominique and the rue del'Universite there 
would be a life nearly as austere as that of 
ancient Rome. But despite its rigidity it 
held a fascination for me. A lost cause has 
always a certain charm; and the cause of 
French aristocracy is so hopelessly lost that 
devotion to it holds the beauty of a young 
girl's Utopian dreams. What furious ideal- 
ism it must demand for one to speak with 
a reverent inclination of the head and a 
hushed voice of the gross, petty, and com- 
monplace man who represents the House of 
Orleans ! 

I do not think that, had I been able 
to imagine myself a part of it, I should 



In the Faubourg St. Germain 



/ choose My Home 

have liked the life of the Faubourg Saint- 
Germain. There would have been too many- 
things I must not do, too little liberty of 
thought, too many opinions handed to me 
ready-made for acceptance, too artificially- 
sharp a distinction between right and wrong, 
too firm a belief in one standard of morality 
for all men, — in short, too little chance for 
individualism. Anatole France would not be 
read here, nor spoken of except bitterly. 
That would be hard. I do not think I should 
have liked the life, — but I shall never know. 
The Boulevard Saint-Germain cuts diag- 
onally through the centre of the faubourg. 
I had crossed it twice in wandering about the 
quarter, but on a third encounter I turned 
into it and so away from the life of which 
I was not a part. The Boulevard Saint-Ger- 
main is not like other boulevards. For all its 
animation, there is about it — at least about 
the part that lies between the river and the 
rue des Saints-Peres, — an air of discreet 
respectability. If it could talk, it would 
[ 87] 



The Book of Paris 

speak in low tones, enunciating distinctly. 
It is not itself aristocratic, hut it is like a 
tradesman who all his life has dealt with 
aristocracy and acquired something oi its 
deportment. I walked along it wdth slow 
steps in the direction of the Quartier Latin, 
looking up at the walls w^hich at this hour 
turned from gray to soft browm, and the 
windows that shone golden in the slanting 
sunlight. The tingling exhilaration of the 
morning was gone; but there was a differ- 
ent charm in the placid warmth of the 
spring afternoon, no less sweet for the touch 
of melancholy one felt in it. It may be that 
age, \vhich seems to me now so bitter, un- 
fair and impotent an end, holds for him who 
has reached it a similar reminiscent beauty 
that he would not exchange for the radiant 
buoyancy of youth. But I am not sure. The 
little old man with a skull-cap who liyes 
alone in the apartment opposite mine at 
Passy, who knocks timidly at my door some- 
times and comes in for a few minutes to 
[ ss ] 



/ Choose My Home 

smoke a cigarette or two, told me once, with 
a wistful smile, that he understood Faust's 
selling his soul to the devil to be young 
again. 

With the mood of this gentle spring after- 
noon the bustling life of the Quartier Latin 
would have been out of keeping, so I left 
the boulevard opposite the old church of 
Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and turned after five 
minutes more of wandering into one of the 
little streets leading from the Place Saint- 
Sulpice to the Luxembourg Gardens. It was 
very narrow, scarcely wider than an alley, 
and despite the low hum that reached it from 
the great square I had just quitted, more 
reposeful than the quieter streets of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain; for in it one felt 
immediately at his ease. The eccentricities 
of its architecture showed that its past had 
been too varied to have become a cult for 
its present. Midway in its brief course I 
stopped for a more leisurely contemplation of 
the democratic incongruity in the buildings 
[89] 



T'hc Book of Paris 

opposite. Between a vast barn-like structure 
that I could not classify, and a hybrid three- 
story affair crowned with a studio, was a di- 
minutive faded house, covered with delicate 
ornamentation, and dating surely from the 
Renaissance, — dilapidated but coquettish 
still, like some little old lady of seventy 
who, yet youthful in spirit, should retain 
the mincino; graces of seventeen. 

On my own side a high wall ran nearly 
the whole length of the street. Anywhere 
else I should have known logically what it 
concealed, but here in this anomalous street 
and this indeterminate quarter that was in 
theory the Quartier Latin, and yet not it nor 
definitely any other in spirit, there was no 
telling, — a convent perhaps, or a school, or 
anything else. Just ahead there was a high 
gate in the wall; but this did not help me, 
for its bars were covered with sheet-iron to 
a point at least a foot above my head. I was 
in truth only mildlv curious, and content to 
stand here for a moment, sniffing at the per- 
[90] 



/ Choose My Home 

fume of lilacs that came to me from what 
direction I did not know. But it was this 
pause that brought the keenest enjoyment 
of the whole day to me and some measure 
of success to my search; for as I stood there 
the gate in the wall opened and a woman 
came out. I saw then whence the perfume 
had come; for she wore a great bunch of 
the fragrant blue flowers at her belt. She 
passed quite close to me, with rapid youth- 
ful steps, and as she did so raised her eyes to 
mine in one swift glance, and as quickly 
dropped them. They were, I observed, a 
deep blue in color. I do not know why I 
noticed this, — probably because they, har- 
monized so well with the lilacs she carried. 
There is, I assure you, no romance con- 
nected with the personality of the young 
woman. She turned the corner at the Place 
Saint-Sulpice and I never saw her again. But 
she was of importance to me nevertheless; 
for in passing out she had left the gate in 
the wall open, — oh, the merest crack, but 
[ 91 ] 



The Book of Paris 

enough so that by bringing my eyes very 
close (and perhaps by pushing the iron door 
just a trilie farther inward), I could see 
something of what lay beyond the wall. 

Set far back in the enclosure rose a great 
house, — how large I could not tell, since 
the inadequacy of the opening through which 
I gazed permitted me only a narrow re- 
stricted view ; for all I know, the house may 
have stretched out indefinitely in either di- 
rection. The walls, in the patches that 
showed near the high roof, were a soft 
gray in tone ; everywhere else they were 
concealed by a mass of sunny green ivy, 
across which rippled waves of shadow in 
the afternoon breeze. From the foot of the 
tall quaintly-carved double-door, sheltered 
above by one of those overhanging marquises 
that lend a dignified charm to the most banal 
entrances, three worn granite steps descended 
to the garden, which filled the wide space 
between the gate and the house, and con- 
tinued to left and right, — how far, I could 
[9-- ] 



/ choose My Home 

only guess. It was formal, as small gardens 
should be; but in its well-balanced flower- 
beds there was such a tangle of roses, such 
a confusion of lilac-bushes, that its conven- 
tionality did not in the least affect its natu- 
ralness, and was no more to be regretted 
than good manners in a woman. Just at the 
limit of my vision on either side rose a small 
carved pillar, supporting a marble jar from 
which slender vines trailed downward with 
a delicate irregular grace; and, as I looked, 
these two columns took on to my imagina- 
tion the aspect of guardians refusing me ad- 
mittance to the paradises beyond them. I 
longed to push the gate farther for a wider 
view, but to have done so would, I was sure, 
have brought down a wrathful gardener to 
close it with a slam, and so take away what 
I already possessed. 

It seemed to me, as I stood gazing and 

drawing deep breaths of the fragrance the 

white and purple lilacs wafted to me, that I 

had known this place a long time. It was 

[93 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

less as though it were the house I should 
choose, than one that had always been mine. 
What kind of people, I wondered, lived 
within the ivy-covered walls and wandered 
at morning through the pleasant paths of the 
garden? I was puzzled, and the next mo- 
ment after glad to have been so. That was 
it, — they would not be of a kind, but un- 
classified, like the house, the garden, and the 
quarter itself; people with a few aristocrats 
among their ancestors, to give them the hor- 
ror of vulgarity, and that rare gentle distinc- 
tion of manner which cannot be acquired, 
but with a preponderance of honest bourgeois 
to keep these things only the leaven they 
should be; with just enough money to save 
their aristocracy from absurdity, and not 
enough to permit of their bourgeoisie' s be- 
coming pompous. The longer I looked, the 
surer I grew that people of ideas must live in 
this place; and the only people who can 
have more than the mere beginning of ideas 
(which they either do not know how, or are 
[94 ] 



/ Choose My Home 

afraid, to follow to a conclusion) are those 
who belong definitely to no caste; for the 
characteristics of caste are prejudices, con- 
ventions, and convictions ; and ideas that 
have grown up amid such surroundings are 
warped and stunted indeed. 

About this garden there was a charm 
which was not merely that of gardens in 
general, but something fresh and personal. 
I felt no jealousy of the people who lived 
here. If they were what I imagined them, I 
was glad of their presence. But it seemed 
unjust that I could not see the wings of the 
house, or what of garden lay beyond the two 
columns with their pots of trailing ferns. 
After all it was my house and my garden, — 
not materially, it is true, but in the finer 
sense that a thought in a book, or a sudden 
mood in the music of a symphony, touching 
something identical in my own nature, is 
mine. 

Then all at once I understood. (Dullard ! 
to have been so long about it ! ) It was just 
[95 ] 



The Book of Paris 

this incompleteness that made the whole 
magic of the place. It is the bungling writer 
who describes his heroine; the wise novelist 
says only that she was beautiful. In all the 
world there was not a garden so lovely as 
that my fancy created out of the fragment 
given me. Not for the certainty that no irate 
gardener existed, would I have pushed the 
gate wider open now. This should be my 
house and my garden, but as they were, — 
withdrawn, only half-seen. And I reflected, 
as I turned away, that in their feminine elu- 
siveness Paris herself was symbolized. For 
Paris is like a woman one loves and who 
loves in return, prodigal of her affection, 
lavishing a thousand tendernesses upon her 
lover, but always with her reticences, her 
hidden depths of soul of which one gets only 
wonderful glimpses now and again. Like a 
woman, she never gives herself completely : 
she loves always less than she is loved; — it 
is the secret of her charm. 



At La Gaite 



Two Plays 




^^'xxry- 




IV 

Two Plays 

EING, for some reason which 
I forget, in the rue Blanche at 
half-past eight of a rainy even- 
ing, I stopped across the street 
from the Theatre Rejane, my eye caught by 
the electric sign that glowed softly through 
the mist. A long line of dripping carriages 
was moving slowly by, with intermittent 
stops before the door. Men, neutrally proper 
in glossy hats and gray-caped coats, stepped 
from them, and delicately gowned women 
descended with the pretty gathering of skirts 
and well-bred air of contempt for the 
weather, which make one wish all theatre 
nights wet. I am continually amazed at the 
grace with which women get out of car- 
riages, at their almost universal ability to 
[99] 



The Book of Paris 

assume that slight haughtiness, that pleas- 
ant sophistication, which raise the act to an 
art. Most of those whom I was watching I 
recognized as pretenders, members of the 
enormous class who pass their time in mak- 
ing believe, in trying to convince the casual 
observer in the street that they are of the 
vrai monde. And yet I am not sure that it 
was not they who did it the best. Acting, 
after all, is more effective than reality. 

I hesitated, but the thought that I had 
never seen Madame Simone decided me. 
Madame Simone le Bargy she had been until 
recently, wife of the eminent actor who sets 
the fashion for Paris in cravats. (There 
would be sadness in the reflection that it is 
to an actor — even though he be of the 
Comedie Francaise — that Paris goes now 
for so important a service, if the individual 
did not vanish before the principle. The idea 
of one man's being felt to dictate a mode 
for London or New York is unimaginable. 
Such a thing is possible only here ; and it is 
[ loo ] 



Entrance to a " BaV 




t: 



Two Play I 



the symbol of a unity, an almost family feel- 
ing, a kind of splendid narrowness, which 
makes Paris a village in sentiment, and gives 
a homogeneity even to its literature.) Mon- 
sieur le Bargy — why, I do not remember, 
but doubtless for the best of reasons — di- 
vorced his wife, upon which she brought 
suit to be allowed still to carry her married 
name, on the ground that it was she at least 
as much as her husband who had made it 
famous, and that to deprive her of what she 
had herself rendered of value was unjust. It 
was a novel point of view, and made Paris 
smile; but legally it did not prevail, and she 
lost her suit. For some time she appeared 
in the programs as "Madame Simone, ex 
le Bargy"; but eventually that also was 
refused her, and she became plain Madame 
Simone. 

Within, the warmth and light of the thea- 
tre, the most beautiful in Paris, greeted me 
pleasantly, and I settled comfortably into the 
seat which the rainy night, or perhaps the 
[ loi ] 



'The Book of Paris 

fact that the season was nearing its close, had 
left me without difficulty of obtaining. The 
play was " La Rafale " of Bernstein, false and 
morbid like the rest of that author's dramas, 
but constructed with a skill and certainty that 
made one put aside his disapproval to admire 
the art of the work. 

It is not, however, with " La Rafale" that 
I am concerned here, but with the curtain- 
raiser. It bore the biblical title of" La Fille 
de Jephte," and it dealt with a young wife 
who, by the force of her innocence and girl- 
ishness, reclaimed her husband from the 
clever and experienced woman of the world, 
his mistress before his marriage, in the end 
utterly vanquishing her redoubtable rival. 
Further details I will spare you. There are 
two kinds of plays that are worth seeing, — 
the very good and the very bad. All others 
leave one with the sense of a wasted evening ; 
but it is seldom that one sits through the 
three hours of a very good or a very bad 
play without feeling germinating in his mind 

[ 102 ] 



'Two Plays 

general ideas which will haunt him for days, 
until, followed to their conclusion, they are 
laid aside, — not forgotten, but become, 
right or wrong, a part of the conception one 
makes for himself of life. I think I had never 
seen anything so bad as " La Fille de Jephte." 
Not that it was vicious; on the contrary it 
fairly oozed virtue. But to me at least it stood 
splendidly for all that is worst in the French 
theatre. For the fact of its immense superi- 
ority to ours and the English theatre cannot 
blind one to the recognition that the French 
theatre too has its faults and commits its 
grave offences. But faults and offences are 
involved so speciously in the flawless tech- 
nique, are dressed in such an iridescent pano- 
ply of wit, that one might long feel them 
only in a vague discontent without such keys 
as " La Fille de Jephte." The wit of the 
curtain-raiser at the Theatre Rejane was not 
keen nor its technique dazzling, and I saw 
in the excessive sweetness of the emotions so 
freely expressed what had before eluded my 
[ 103 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

definition, the great fault of the French the- 
atre, — sentimentality. 

Mr. Locke, in his delightful book ** The 
Morals of Marcus Ordeyne," observes that 
we have the richest language in the world, 
and use it as though it were the poorest. It 
is perhaps no more than a corollary to add 
that it is also the most precise and used as the 
vaguest. The beautiful lucidity of French 
prose is not due so much to the language it- 
self as to the mastery with which it is handled. 
Our own language can express with precision 
fine shades of meaning for which French is 
quite without an equivalent ; but we are un- 
worthy of our riches. We are unskilled work- 
men, puttering clumsily with a complicated 
and delicate machine, of whose possibilities 
we have only a dim conception. One of the 
most vivid examples of the strange confusion 
into which we are always falling is our lack 
of appreciation of the distinction between 
the words "sentiment" and ** sentimental- 
ity." There are even people who use "sen- 
[ 104 ] 



Two Plays 

timentality " as though it meant merely the 
excess of sentiment. And yet the distinc- 
tion is as sharp as that between beauty and 
ugliness. Sentimentality is simply false sen- 
timent. Sentiment is the highest thing that 
exists, sentimentality the basest ; and the 
failure to separate the two forces clearly in 
one's mind means misconception of a 
thousand things in experience, — more than 
that, it means failure to understand one's 
self 

A man of sentimentality is a sentimental- 
ist, but a man of sentiment has no name. 
Sentiment is the highest thing in his life, and 
as much as he can he keeps it from sight. It is 
not something he can turn on or off at will, 
like sentimentality. He is not proud of it, 
for it does not even belong to him; on the 
contrary, he belongs to it. It grips him and 
shakes him when he least expects it. He does 
not take pleasure in it : every touch of it is 
pain. (And indeed it is safe to say that, when- 
ever we find ourselves enjoying an emotion, 
[ 105 ] 



T/.h' Bo(d' of Pii/is 

wc \\\.\\ tn.ikc up oiu tnuuls lh.it it is not 
sentiment l>ut sentunfut.ilitN ."l Tlu' .ittituilc 
ol the- scMitnncnf .ilist tow.iul Ins sentinuMt- 
t.iht\- is \ cMV ilifUMcnt. Wc t.ilks .ibout it 
tic-cM\-; \\c nuisc\s n. .nui munstcis tv> it ;is 
tlunii'Ji It were .1 ehiKl ; .nul \\ hen ho tnuls 
th.if It h.is .uKlt\l .m uu"h or two to its st.itui c. 
iu' shcils tc\n s ot ION. 1 1 exists not m spite i>t 
himsell. hut tor hunseh. It is his iMe.itest 
ple.isute, .iiul .ill the tune he p.ir.ules it ;ii> 
sentiment. 

I nu;;ht eontinue. .nul shouUl iu> ilouht, 
\Nere I not une.isiK' t."ous»."ious th.it tlu^ vliN'i- 
sion ol the woiUi into men ot sentiment .uul 
sentiment.ilists nn'.is .irtitiei.il .nul only m.ule 
tor the s.ike ot ele.nness. The worUl is not 
m truth so .irhiti.irilv or simplv ilnuleil. .inv 
more th.m it is vlivuleil into heroes .iiul \il- 
Liins, as we lo\ e to im.i^ine trom time to 
time over .i t.urv -t.ile. There is m every m.m 
some sentiment .iiul some sentiment.ilitv. As 
the one ileyelo[\<. the other diminishes ; hut 
even in the m.m ot protouiulest emotions 
1 K>o I 



T^wo I Hay 



there 18 always at least a j;o'/j|jj]jty f>f fa]:.c 
sentiment, anr] cvo/i tljc creator of Little 
Nell had many njor/jcut.-, of j^euuine fecliru/. 
\\ v. for tliir, rcasou that I saifl wc rrju'>t uu- 
derstaiifl well tfje fli'ji/ief ion hefweeu '.erjti- 
inent a/jfl .sentimentality to uuderstand our- 
belveb. 

From this reason too comes tlif; flifTicuIty 
of disentangling the tljrearl of sentimentality 
in a clever I^Vench play. 'Jfje false feeling 
so skilfully involverl in the rapirl dialf;gue 
of passing r/enf/, apj;eal.'- to the allr;y in our 
own nature'- a , insidif^usly as tlje daJj ui 
rum in a gla'/, of puuelj to t lie palate f;f a 
total ah:.tainer. A '* Mile de jejjhte" v. ne- 
cessary to make clear the rlepth', u'i our tur- 
j;itijfie. V ()r it v. turpif ufie ; tfje ua jne i'. norje 
t(jo hla(,k. One \\;\', only to consider }j07/ 
lofty is the religion'. ',efj',e, to hecorne aware 
how base \\ if/, 'jrnulation ; how jjairjfidly 
high and pure is the pity tliat sweeps uvvs 
us at times, — so rarely, tf; aj)preciate }jf;w 
ignoble and egotistic is tlie imitation in 
I '^V 1 



The Book of Paris 

which we indulge ourselves — so often. Real 
pity, as it is the deepest, is the most painful 
emotion we are capable of experiencing ; 
mock pity is but an agreeable form of self- 
flattery. We linger with a delicious sadness 
over Sterne's soliloquy on the dead ass; but 
there is no pleasure to be felt from the scene 
in which Lear wakes and recognizes Cor- 
delia. It tears mercilessly at our profoundest 
passion. I think the reason that the greatest 
masterpiece of drama is seldom seen on the 
stage is less that, as is averred, there is no 
one great enough to act it, than that people 
do not care to feel so genuinely. We re- 
proach our Puritan ancestors with having 
been ashamed of their emotions, and it was 
an unlovely trait, — for genuine emotions are 
the only things of which one has the certain 
right not to be ashamed; but may it not 
have been with them in part the instinctive 
horror of falling into false sentiment? They 
were so unswervingly honest, our ancestors. 
We, their descendants, are born into a dif- 
[ loS ] 



Two Plays 



ferent world, a world less straightforward, 
more complex, where we no longer know 
what we believe, where right and wrong are 
tangled hopelessly, where we cannot always 
distinguish truth from falsehood even in 
ourselves, where only beauty and ugliness 
are still sharply separated ; which is perhaps 
why — but that I must leave for another 
essay. 

To the last ten minutes of the young 
wife's triumphant progress I paid but a me- 
chanical attention. Scenes from other plays 
were passing across my mind. This situation 
which had pleased me but left me troubled, 
that conversation which even in touching an 
emotion had given me a confused sense of 
uneasiness, — their falsity fairly sprang out 
at me in this moment. And the longer I re- 
flected, the more profoundly it seemed to 
me that sentimentality pervaded the French 
theatre. False feeling, besides being more 
agreeable, is far easier of arousing than real 
sentiment. There area hundred little tricks a 
[ 109 ] 



The Book of Paris 

dramatist knows, — tricks of climax, tricks 
of repetition, — that make one catch one's 
breath, despite one's understanding them. I 
have many times felt tears rise quickly to 
my eyes at some sudden, skilful, and unex- 
pected turn in a play, though all the time 
I was in truth as calm and unmoved as I am 
at this moment. By striking one's knee one 
can cause an involuntary motion of the leg ; 
so by pulling certain mental strings in his 
audience, a playwright can bring forth 
laughter which has no gayety behind it, and 
tears which have no sadness. Sentimentality, 
too, in which broad effects are possible, is so 
much more dramatically effective than sen- 
timent, that it is perhaps logical that the 
dramatist, for whom effect is so essential, 
should use it freely. But his sin is none the 
less for all that. There are, of course, seri- 
ous contemporary French plays, such as 
"Amants" of Maurice Donnay, which are 
without a taint of sentimentality; but in 
general it is in the lighter, gayer plays — 
[ no ] 



Street of the Little Butcher Shop 



SP"Tv'S^ 




"Two Plays 

plays like "Sa Soeur" of Tristan Bernard, or 
the delightful " Miquette et Sa Mere " of 
Caillavet and Robert de Flers — that one 
feels an untroubled and unqualified enthusi- 
asm for the French theatre. 

Very different from " La Fille de Jephte/* 
yet throwing almost as much light on an- 
other side of the same subject, was a play 
which I saw a few nights later, in company 
with a charming French family. Considered 
retrospectively, our choice of a theatre is a 
mystery ; but there are certain rare evenings 
when the inconsequential is the logical, and 
at the time I remember that there seemed 
nothing strange, after failing to get seats for 
the Varietes, in our driving quite as a mat- 
ter of course to the Folies-Dramatiques. The 
Folies-Dramatiques is what would be called 
in America " The Home of Melodrama " ; 
and as we entered, the first act of "Les Ex- 
ploits d'un Titi Parisien" was drawing to a 
throbbing close. I looked about in delight. 
The house, crowded except for the boxes, 
[ III ] 



The Book of Paris 

was breathless ; and the uppermost gallery, 
with the silent unreality of its mottled, dimly- 
seen background growing more distinct far- 
ther forward, and overflowing at the railing 
into sharply outlined elbows and intense, 
straining faces, gave one the effect of a cy- 
clorama. There was no claque needed here. 
The applause came sharp and crisp at each 
noble speech of the hero. 

He was an honest workman, the hero, and 
he loved (oh, but really loved, — only think of 
it. Messieurs Bourget and Prevost, — with- 
out once asking himself, " Do I in truth 
love?" or "How do I love?") a midinette, a 
little Parisian seamstress, who returned his 
affection. But she was a woman and weak. 
Armand Lafontaine, the defaulting cashier 
of a mill, who also loved her unhesitatingly, 
offered passionately to share his riches with 
her, — an offer that she, dazzled with the 
dream of luxury and ignorant of the source 
of his wealth, was not strong enough to re- 
sist. Deserting her fiance, she fled with the 

[ 112 ] 



"Two Plays 



villain to England. How Petit-Louis, the 
hero (described in the programme as jeune 
et brave ouvrier^y with Grand- Jean i^son ami 
devoue), followed them across the Channel; 
how he was taken under the protection of 
Lord Richard, an English nobleman, for a 
service rendered to the latter's daughter. 
Miss Hellen (spelling unrevised); how he 
escaped the plots of assassination directed 
against him ; how he carried Suzette back 
to France; how the villain, with an uncal- 
culating depth of passion that I could not 
but admire, followed her at the risk of his 
liberty, and implored her to return to him ; 
how, spurned scornfully, he would have mur- 
dered her had it not been for Grand-Jean, 
who arrived at just the right moment; and 
how the railing of the balcony on which the 
two men were struggling, gave way, and 
the unhappy cashier was precipitated into 
the street below, — you may still learn if you 
will go to the Folies-Dramatiques. It was 
amusing to observe here, too, naively, as in 
[ 113 ] 



The Book of Paris 

the boulevard plays ironically, the effect of 
the entente cordiale. The Englishman was no 
longer le traitre, but a sort of subsidiary hero. 
There are certain truths that no amount 
of experience can teach us. We should know, 
for example, that in any but the subtlest com- 
parisons of national character we shall find 
nine similarities to one difference, and yet 
it is always differences that we expect. That 
we should look eagerly for differences is es- 
sential ; but that we should expect them is 
stupid, — which I recognized humbly in 
finding myself surprised that " Les Exploits 
d'un Titi Parisien " should so closely resem- 
ble an American melodrama. The only real 
distinction, and one greatly to the credit of 
the French play, was that not a gun was 
fired, not a bomb exploded, not even a rail- 
way train blown up. As in American melo- 
dramas of the sort, the morality was impec- 
cable, and might well serve as a reproach to 
the authors of more fashionable productions. 
It was even suggested that, despite her week's 
[ 114 ] 



Two Play I 



sojourn with the villain, the heroine had re- 
mained virtuous, but this was not insisted on. 

Patience is not a virtue that develops with 
culture. No audience of the Comedie Fran- 
caise or the Renaissance would have toler- 
ated the soliloquies and reflections on life 
to which the spectators at the Folies-Drama- 
tiques listened with sympathy and apprecia- 
tion. " I esteem," said the hero, his up-turned 
face glowing with inspiration, " I esteem that 
an honest workman is of greater worth than 
a dishonest man of wealth ! " The house 
shook with enthusiasm, and indeed one could 
not but feel that the observation was re- 
strained and conservative. 

Obviously this too was sentimentality, and 
I found myself wondering why I should ex- 
perience no distaste, but rather a warm kind- 
liness toward it; while for "La Fille de 
Jephte," not less crude in its way, I had 
had nothing but disapproval. Was it, I asked 
myself, simply that the melodrama, with its 
situations at which I did not thrill and its 
[ 115 ] 



The Book of Paris 

grandiloquence at which I could only smile, 
flattered me into a sense of superiority to 
this eager unconscious public, who did not 
smile and who did thrill ? Perhaps, in part. 
One's vanity is always lying in wait for one, 
and this particular phase — amused toler- 
ance — is so easily aroused. It is responsible 
for most of the child-literature that flour- 
ishes in America (if I had not had "La 
Fille de Jephte" before my eyes, I should 
have gone to that to choose an example of 
the direst sentimentality), and for all of the 
dialect plays. There was, however, another 
and I hope profounder reason. Whatever 
one might think of the nature of the emo- 
tions in question, it was beyond doubt that 
the audience was feeling them sincerely. 
But it is not an explanation to say that what 
is sentimentality in one man may be senti- 
ment in another. Sentiment is sentiment, 
and sentimentality is sentimentality. Who 
set the standard I do not know; but that 
there is a standard I cannot an instant doubt. 
[ ii6] 



T'wo Plays 

We are none of us fine enough to distin- 
guish perfectly at all times between the two ; 
but if we are growing emotionally, we are 
learning day by day to do so more nearly. 
And so, paradoxical as it may sound, the 
conclusion to which I found myself forced 
before the manifest integrity of this audi- 
ence, was that it is possible to feel false sen- 
timent genuinely. 

Grant Allen, in his guide to Florence, 
tells one sternly that to gain a first superficial 
impression of Angelico's "Crucifixion" one 
should stand before the great picture not less 
than an hour (as a matter of fact it is only 
the man of rarest emotional sustainment who 
can look at any work of art for more than 
fifteen minutes at a time without losing all 
sense of its beauty) ; and I shall never forget 
the vision of two maiden ladies stationed 
patiently in front of it, guide-book in hand, 
their eyes wandering vaguely from figure to 
figure, but dropping furtively from time to 
time to their watches. Hypocrisy is nowhere 
[ 117] 



"The Book of Paris 

more rampant than among tourists in Italy ; 
and it is with a sense of relief that one re- 
marks the sincere admiration in the faces 
about a Bernini and the almost ecstatic pleas- 
ure in those before a Carlo Dolci. It was 
before a Carlo Dolci that the two maiden 
ladies of San Marco should have been, for 
whatever their age, — and far from me be 
the impoliteness of a guess, — they were but 
children aesthetically. There is no escaping 
it: natural taste is bad, natural feeling is 
false. A person of untrained emotions will 
thrill to the mawkishness of Mendelssohn's 
"Spring Song," and remain unmoved by the 
splendor of a Mozart sonata not less simple 
in form; will pass by a Botticelli, to stop 
before a Greuze. 

I remember that as a child no book 
equalled the "Arabian Nights" in my affec- 
tions. Such statements as "He struck the 
ground with his foot, and the earth opened 
beneath him disclosing a flight of steps," 
held for me a breathless charm that neither 
[ ii8 ] 



Two Plays 



Hans Andersen nor Grimm could give me ; 
but I am amused, in looking back, to find 
that the stories that I loved the best were 
invariably the feeble interpolated ones, — 
"The Story of the Three Sisters," for ex- 
ample. I know to-day that the tale which 
was my favorite among all — "Prince Ah- 
med and the Fairy Pari-Banou" — is weak 
and insipid beside the splendid march of the 
" Story of the Third Calendar." Normally, 
sentimentality is a step towards sentiment. 
There is nothing sad in liking Guido Reni; 
the melancholy thought is that one should 
continue to like him. For the honest senti- 
mentality of a man who is not yet capable 
of a higher emotion, one should feel respect; 
it is when, as in so many French plays, sen- 
timentality is refined and a form of self- 
indulgence for people who are capable of 
sentiment, that it becomes intolerable. 

With the audience at the Folies-Drama- 
tiques I felt a friendly sympathy. But for 
my chance of freer development and greater 
[ 119] 



'The Book of Paris 

leisure, all this bathos and banality would 
have been as real to me as to the sailor in 
the gallery. Nor was the gulf between us so 
wide or impassable. I was of no different 
stuff than these people, — neither better nor 
worse naturally, neither truer nor falser. If 
I had grown away from them somewhat in 
sentiment, — as it would have been unpar- 
donable for me not to have done, — there 
were still a thousand mental fibres binding 
me to them. "Now," I said to myself over 
and over during the play, "I should have 
thrilled with sorrow; here I should have 
shuddered with apprehension" ; and I heard 
within me faint and distant echoes of those 
emotions. 



A Cocotte 



Au Bois 



/^ V 






4.. 



L 



^* 






\ ^<' ^ 



r^ 







V 

Au Bois 

lAY, and afternoon — and the 
Bois de Boulogne ! 

I am half afraid to go on. 
There are a thousand things to 
say, and yet I feel that if I wrote a work in 
three volumes and said them all, I might 
look back and think to myself that they were 
better and more completely said in those first 
eight words. But perhaps you do not know 
the Bois ; then you will not mind my amus- 
ing myself with just a few of the thousand 
things. Perhaps again you do. If so, two 
courses of action are open to you : you may 
close the book at once, or you may read on 
disapprovingly, and frown, and say to your- 
self, " He misses the spirit of the place " ; 
which, too, will not be without its charm. 
[ 123 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

How I came to be in the Bois is so obvious 
that it does not matter. Where else, unless 
to the Luxembourg Gardens, could one go 
on a spring afternoon when the shifting sun- 
light was as capricious as the breeze, when 
every horse-chestnut along the Champs Ely- 
sees nodded its white plumes, as if saying, 
" There are a great many more like me a 
little farther on, — yes, in that direction"; 
and when even the cloud-shadows that flitted 
across the Place de I'Etoile made straight 
for the Porte Dauphine. 

Except the step one takes from the rue de 
Vaugirard into the Luxembourg Gardens, I 
know of none so enchanted as that by which 
one leaves Paris at the Porte Dauphine and 
enters the Bois de Boulogne. One walks out 
of the city into a fairy tale. It is a French 
fairy tale. In these courtly woods there is 
none of that sombre anxious mystery that in- 
vests the forest in which Hansel and Gretel 
found the witch's gingerbread house, nor the 
atmosphere of charms and magic enveloping 
[ 124] 



In the Bois de Boulogne 



Au Bois 

that in which Amjed and Assad wandered 
before they came to the country of the Fire- 
worshippers. No, the Porte Dauphine is the 
gateway to one of those well-bred seven- 
teenth-century fairy tales, in which every- 
thing is in good taste, where the princes 
make love to the princesses in the politest, 
most formal fashion, and beneath which runs 
a gentle current of satire. But I, for one, am 
too happy at being able to enter any fairy tale 
at all to quibble about the kind. 

And fairy tale it was, — oh, unmistakably ! 
I knew that, the moment my feet had crossed 
the threshold. I had known it before ; I had 
known it always, it seemed ; yet each time I 
returned to the Bois the recognition came as 
something new and surprising, and never so 
fresh, so convincing, as on this May after- 
noon. The wide splendidly-curving route de 
Suresnes was swept with great silent automo- 
biles; along its outer edges carriages rolled 
by more slowly, and horsemen trotted styl- 
ishly. Horsemen, automobiles, carriages and 
[ 125 ] 



Tbr Book of Riris 

{\\c l.uhcs in tlu'in sli.uliui; their c\cs with 
pretty httU^ p.ir.isols, outside the iron i;;ites 
thev w oiiUi he vMilinatv enoui^h ; heie tlu'V 
\\ ere all iiiuler a spell. Aiul on the gravel- 
walks that hiM'der the roail, in the iiitermi- 
nahle line ot chairs i^to he rented at two sous 
tor an oriiinarv, tour tor an arm, — ehair) sat 
niiraeulous /','.v'Vi-,'.m-, and enehanted nurses 
watehiui^ nia^ie hahies. Hevond, to riiiht and 
leit, were the woods, dim and eool with slid- 
ing shadows, hrilliant and warm with green- 
gold pools ol sunshine. A luindred little 
paths leil in, hut I waited until the route de 
Suresnes should haN e led me tarther on he- 
tore leaving it. There were too tnanv people 
in the paths here. Not that I \\ ished to avoid 
them ^^that would indeed he to miss the spirit 
ot the Inns^, hut seen thus trom \\ithoiit thev 
were so iiiiieh in keeping, so decorative, that 
1 disliked to approach and destrov the charm. 
An artist once pointed out to tne how, seen 
hv one in a strong light, all colors in halt- 
light tall into "value"; and I have treasured 
I 1-0 ] 



/Ifyt Bois 

the kiic>wlc(]gc ever since. Tljcre was a wo- 
man seated in a little glade, lier chair against 
the trunk of an oak. Ciown and wide hat and 
small half-hlurred prcjfilc, — she was perfect. 
Seen thus .sIjc wa', ratliuDtly, harmoniously 
beautiful. I refused to firaw nearer. 

So, still follc;wirig the route de Suresnes, 
I wandered on past tlie lake with its poplar- 
clad island. I might have turned fjff here, 
for the paths and the glades were less fre- 
quented; hut T lingered a little longer, con- 
tent to loaf, — U) Jldnery as the French ex- 
pressively has it, — and watch the incredihly 
heterogeneous crowd about me. English, 
Americans, Turks, guttural-sputtering Ger- 
mans, with " Remember Sedan " written so 
unmistakably in their aggressive carriage that 
I wondered they were not immediately mas- 
sacred, until I remembered what contempt 
the Greeks had felt for their conquerors, and 
understood; — it was a congress of all na- 
tions, and yet the whole effect was superla- 
tively French. Just as Rome received wave 
[ 127 ] 



T^he Book of Paris 

after wave of Germanic invasion, changed 
her victors to vanquished w^ith the spell of 
herself, and left them Romans or (I cannot 
help fancying, with the analogy in my mind) 
would-be Romans, — so to-day does Paris 
rise supreme and unchangeable above her 
invaders. Let the Danes and the Germans 
come ; turn in all the hordes of transatlantic 
barbarians (most of us have already been 
turned in), wise men or fools, philosophers, 
poets or libertines, — there is something, 
good or bad, for every one. Paris is inex- 
haustible, and always Paris. Those who came 
with an idea, lose it, but are given a hundred 
others in return ; those who came for no 
reason at all, find one for not going back; 
and those who came to scoff, remain to pay, 
— which serves them right. Having achieved 
this profound reflection, I found myself stand- 
ing still and gazing at an excellently placed 
chair that happened to be empty. I had one 
second of hesitation, then I dropped into it, 
feeling in my pocket for the copper which 
[ 128 ] 



Au Bois 

that hawk-eyed old woman, already ap- 
proaching with her sheaf of yellow coupons, 
would exact in the name of the French Re- 
public. 

We accuse women of being perverse; yet 
their perversity is as nothing compared to 
ours. They are only perverse as to facts (be- 
ing told to do one thing they do another) ; 
but we men are perverse about an idea, about 
a fancy of our own, simply for the pleasure 
of it. Consider my case. The woods were 
more attractive than the route de Suresnes ; 
I intended to go into the woods; I wanted 
to go into the woods ; yet because my mind 
was made up to go, I found a guilty pleasure 
in sitting down here and putting it off. 

" I will just wait," I said apologetically, 
"until something happens; then I'll go." 
What if nothing did happen'? Impossible. You 
might as well fear that nothing will happen 
in a play, that the hero will have no adven- 
tures, that the heroine will marry some one 
else and go to live somewhere off the stage 
[ 129 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

before the third act. The Bois is just a play. 
You might as well fear that nothing would 
happen in a fairy tale. The Bois is a fairy 
tale, — a seventeenth-century French fairy 
tale, one of Madame d'Aulnoy's or Monsieur 
de Caylus's — remember, when you speculate 
on what kind of thing will happen. 

The spring breeze was fresh and impe- 
rious. It tumbled the yellow curls of a little 
four-year-old American boy who was play- 
ing near me, and kept his English nurse pat- 
ting at her unbeautiful coiffure. It ruffled 
the parasols in the carriages, and annoyed 
especially one horsewoman who bent her 
head now and again to meet it as she can- 
tered by. She was a wonderful little creature, 
demi mondaine from the tip of her little Amer- 
ican shoe to her mass of bronze hair (like 
that of the Botticelli Venus) and the tiny 
man's hat that surmounted it. But demi mon- 
daine or duchess, she sat her horse well. So 
much cannot be said of her cavalier, a gray- 
haired man of about fifty, who trotted un- 
[ 130 ] 



Au Bois 

comfortably a hundred feet behind, as though 
he had been a groom instead of the financier 
who could have bought his companion three 
times over, that he probably was. As for her, 
she rode ahead cruelly, with never a look 
behind. But only a little way past my chair 
she raised her head unwarily, and a sharper 
gust of wind than any yet caught hat and 
bronze hair, swept them swiftly off, and 
dropped them limply to the ground. I heard 
a cry from beside me, and withdrawing my 
eyes for a moment from the stage, I saw the 
little boy with the yellow curls standing, his 
face set, his eyes wide with horror at the 
spectacle of so much suffering. He raised 
one hand to his own locks ; — they were still 
safe. A spectator, stepping out, picked up 
hat and wig, and handed them soberly to 
the cavalier, who accepted them with im- 
perturbable gravity, and trotted off after his 
inamorata. (She would wait for him now, I 
thought.) The last episode was too much 
for the English nurse, who broke into hearty 
[ 131 ] 



The Book of Paris 

British laughter. But the boy turned on her 
in a flash, his eyes ablaze with anger. 

"You muthn't laugh, nurthe!" he cried, 
stamping his small foot. "Itithn't funny! 
it ithn't!" 

"I should like," I reflected as I rose, "to 
know that child's mother. She must be the 
only woman in Paris who wears her own 
hair ; and living in Paris, she would not do 
that unless it were beautiful." 

All manner of paths lead off from the 
route de Suresnes at this point, — paths that 
run parallel with the road, diagonal paths, 
paths that begin to meander before they 
have gone six rods. I took one that plunged 
straight in and, like an enchanted flight of 
steps, led me at once from the brilliant con- 
fusion of the highway into a different world, 
a world of soft, half-audible sounds, of gold 
light and green shadows. Sometimes through 
the trees to right or left I would get a swift 
glimpse of a white gown or catch the mur- 
mur of words; but the path itself was quite 
[ 132 ] 



Au Bois 

deserted. Above, in the sunlight, the top 
leaves of the elms and maples vi^ere like 
stained glass. There are no other woods so 
green as the French woods; for in France 
not alone the foliage of the trees, but their 
trunks, are green, — a dull moss-color. In 
one place the path was all in darkness ; far- 
ther on it was a brook of sunlight, with a 
long shadow lying across it like a bridge. 
High up the gusty spring wind caught at the 
tops of the trees, and set them rustling almost 
articulately ; but here below there was only 
a futile baby breeze, full of a hundred child- 
ish impulses that came to nothing. It tried 
daintily to blow the shadow away, and fail- 
ing, danced off to other absurdities. 

The path stopped abruptly; but from a 
little green circle of open ground in which 
it ended two others led away, to right and 
left. It occurred to me after a moment's 
hesitation that, if I walked in turn a little 
way down each, I should surely find some- 
thing to direct my choice. The right-hand 
[ 133 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

path offered a butterfly and a pair of lovers ; 
but I had not gone far along that to the left, 
when I caught, faint but sweet, the scent of 
acacias. I hurried on swiftly. I had forgot- 
ten : it was mid-May, and the wonderful 
trees that give the Allee des Acacias its name 
would be in bloom there and in the woods 
all about it. 

Where the delicate odor was strongest 
and the blossoms lay thickest, I paused. 
Everywhere the white petals were drifting 
slowly down. They were falling all around 
me ; I felt one brush my cheek softly. They 
had covered the ground with a white foam. 
It fairly snowed blossoms. And their fra- 
grance hung like a faint mist over every- 
thing. As I lifted my head to inhale more 
profoundly their perfume, I felt the breath 
suddenly choke in my throat, and my eyes 
grow hot with tears. I am not ashamed to 
write of it ; for if one is not to feel his eyes 
wet in the sadness and wistfulness of the per- 
ception of perfect beauty, then indeed aspi- 
[ 134] 



At the Chateau de Madrid 




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1 --'"'^~^-^ ''i/j 



Au Bois 

rations are dead, a Beethoven symphony 
becomes only an exercise in harmony, and 
we must weep other and bitter tears at the 
world's sterility. 

But we are all chained by the fundamental 
materialism of our lives. Our divinest long- 
ings we instinctively attempt to express in 
terms of facts. It is this that makes the step 
from the sublime to the ridiculous so short 
and so inevitable. I had never had a mo- 
ment of truer feeling, of higher reaching 
out toward the unfettered soul of beauty ; and 
yet (it is right that I should tell you) two 
seconds later I was trying to express the dis- 
content, which was my helpless struggle to 
escape from the finite, as a concrete desire. 

"One should be in love," I thought, "to 
appreciate this ! " 

Do me the credit to believe that the next 
instant I had turned on myself with scorn. 
And well I might ! Put aside all the stu- 
pidity, all the prosaic ignominy of which 
I had been guilty in so interpreting what I 
[ 135 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

had felt; take the reflection as just a gener- 
ahzation on a walk beneath flowering trees 
that had a pretty perfume ; and then consider 
its overwhelming absurdity ! One can appre- 
ciate nothing when one is in love. One is 
dazed, self-centred, drunk — with the charm 
but the dullness of intoxication. No, to ap- 
preciate, one must not be in love — one must 
be free, clear-headed, untrammeled ; but — 
and this is the secret — one must have been 
in love, and one must feel the possibility of 
falling in love again. 

" You," I said to myself contemptuously, 
"are unworthy of genuine feeling. Your 
mind is as earthy as Monsieur Perrichon's, 
and you had better be off with it to some 
place that is mundane enough to be within 
its comprehension, — the Chateau de Ma- 
drid, for example"; and turned my steps 
sheepishly thither. 

" But," you will say, if you have been in 
the Bois only a few times, " the Chateau de 
Madrid is not in the Bois at all ; it is across 
[ 136] 



Au Bois 

the Boulevard Richard Wallace from it at 
the Porte de Madrid." If, on the other 
hand, you have come to know the splendid 
Parisian park more intimately, you will for 
once, I think, nod approval. For as Brook- 
line is to Boston, — that is to say, more 
essentially Bostonian than Boston itself, — 
so stands the Chateau de Madrid in relation 
to the Bois de Boulogne. It is like one of 
those models of an ancient city before which 
one lingers, fascinated, at museums. In the 
city itself there would have been at any pe- 
riod uncharacteristic monuments, meaning- 
less sticks and stones ; in the model there is 
nothing that is not significant. So here, all 
the gracefulness of the Bois, all its unreality, 
all its prettiness, all its chic (if you will per- 
mit the word), are gathered up and ex- 
pressed in this dainty little court which is 
the Chateau de Madrid, as a distant land- 
scape is gathered into the finding-glass of a 
camera. What the Chateau de Madrid may 
once have been, or what may formerly have 
[ 137 ] 



The Book of Paris 

stood in the exquisite place it occupies, I do 
not know. To-day it is a restaurant, and its 
full name is Le Restaurant du Chateau de 
Madrid; so I fancy it is called for some 
vanished palace. Moreover it is not a res- 
taurant of the Bois but the restaurant. 
There are numerous others, all crowded at 
the proper hours in spring and summer; 
nevertheless, the Chateau de Madrid is the 
restaurant. Society is fickle. By the time 
you read this, some other may have its ap- 
proval, and the Chateau de Madrid, though 
seemingly as crowded as ever, be deserted, 
to one who can discriminate. Only a i^w 
years ago Armenonville was supreme, and 
now who goes to Armenonville ? and how 
odd it seems to be told, in a novel dealing 
with the polite world, of engagements made 
for breakfast there ! But fashion is a wheel 
that rotates (I think some one else has said 
this before me), passing repeatedly the same 
point ; so it may be that if, through some 
improbable chance, there is any one to read 
[ 138 ] 



Au Bois 

these words ten years from now, he will 
smile and acknowledge that there is no res- 
taurant but the Chateau de Madrid, and que 
les autre s ti existent pas. 

A short curving drive, bordered with 
glowing beds of flowers, leads to the arch- 
way through which one reaches the gay lit- 
tle court. There are two acceptable manners 
of entering the Chateau de Madrid, on foot, 
or in your own carriage. There is a third 
way, — by an ordinary taxi-cab. But, though 
the face of the servant who hastens up is as 
impassive as ever, and his deference in assist- 
ing your lady — if lady you have — to 
alight, as perfect, there is that in his manner 
which, added to your own sense of wrong- 
doing, makes then for your discomfort. I 
entered on foot. 

There is for most people a kind of exhil- 
aration in an environment of elegance. I feel 
it sometimes in a drawing-room, where per- 
haps the wit is not keen, and the conversa- 
tion much less brilliant than in many a dingy 
[ 139 ] 



T^he Book of Paris 

cafe. I felt it now, as the suave mattre d' hotel 
bowed me to an unoccupied table whence I 
had an easy view of the whole graceful little 
scene. The sensation is a puzzling one. It 
is hardly the titillation of tickled vanity, the 
effervescence of the consciousness that one 
is part of a superior world; for it is depend- 
ent solely on appearances, and remains no 
duller or less grateful, when of one's own 
certain knowledge one can correct the ap- 
pearances. The questions, " Who were your 
fathers ? " ** Had you grandfathers ? " never 
lurk uncomfortably behind it. Indeed it is, I 
fancy, more readily obtained from a restau- 
rant full of cocottes than from a room full 
of duchesses; since a very old and dowdy 
woman may be a duchess, while only a 
young and well-groomed one can be a co- 
cotte. The cocotte to-day, in her brief but- 
terfly hour of life, sets the fashion, and is 
supreme in elegance. The comtesse or the 
marquise, immured in her grim faubourg, 
has yet, it is true, something else that she 
[ 140 ] 



Au Bois 

will not bring to the Chateau de Madrid to 
profane — the tradition of a nobler vanished 
elegance (though indeed those long-dead 
ladies, her relatives, whose portraits as shep- 
herdesses smile down upon her shabby gen- 
tility, were only superlative cocottes them- 
selves, willing, the most virtuous of them, to 
sell themselves for the king's favor) ; but as 
for the respectable bourgeoises let her sniff 
as morally as she please, however high her 
bourgeoisie, there will be a touch of envy 
beneath the disdain with which she regards 
the elegance of the cocotte. 

Not half the tables in the little open-air 
enclosure were taken, for it was not quite the 
tea-hour yet. But the people were arriving 
fast. On the other side of the drive that leads 
into and through the court an orchestra was 
playing ; but though one saw all the panto- 
mime of music, only a sudden crescendo in the 
strings, or an occasional shrill note from the 
flute, was audible. The rest was drowned in 
the rattling of horses' hoofs, the crunching 
[ 141 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

of the gravel beneath carriage-wheels, and 
the warning blasts of entering automobiles. 
It was just as well : I had heard that orches- 
tra on quieter afternoons. There were flow- 
ers all about, in masses, in boxes, in pots. 
The mirrors that lined the entrance-wall, 
and others tucked in every conceivable cor- 
ner, glowed with the scarlet reflection of 
geraniums. The breeze was subsiding (it 
would play no more tricks that day) ; but 
when with its gentle subdued puffs it touched 
my face, I was conscious of a heady intoxi- 
cating odor, the combined fragrance of roses, 
iris, mignonette, and the different subtle per- 
fumes that the women wore. 

The tables were filling swiftly. From car- 
riage after carriage the women descended, 
light-gowned, dainty, young, — nearly all 
of them, — (there were men too, but no one 
looked at them) ; until in a surprisingly short 
time, the court was full, and the mattre d' ho- 
tel spread out his expressive deprecating 
hands, with a gesture of sorrowful helpless- 
[ 142 ] 



An Old Habitue 



■^k/ji* 



"-ife> 









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Au Bois 

ness, before the straggling late-comers. A 
pleasant hum of voices, that was like the dif- 
fused radiance of the flowers or the pervasive 
perfume, filled the enclosure. Daintiness, 
elegance, the perfection of prettiness, — one 
got the impression of these things harmoni- 
ously through three senses at once. It may 
not have been an impression of much im- 
portance in life ; but it was a most agreeable 
one. Moreover, about no other place that I 
have seen was there ever a more splendid 
atmosphere of youfh. It set eyes sparkling 
and tongues babbling. These women — most 
of them — were des cigales, and this was 
their summer. Heart and soul they threw 
themselves unreservedly into the present. 
Who stopped to think of the poor cigales of 
yesterday ? Who would croak of the winter 
to come? Pah ! Sermons at a masked ball ? 
An exquisite fair-haired girl, in a pale blue 
gown and a wide, slanting, blue-flowered hat, 
caught me gazing at her, and threw me a 
swift brilliant smile. It was not that she 
[ 143 ] 



The Book of Paris 

fancied me, I knew, but she was pleased at 
the unguarded admiration in my look, and 
then — she and I were young, while the man 
she was with was forty at least. Without 
him, it is true, or some other like him, she 
would not have been here nor wearing the 
pale blue gown ; and the great drooping 
hat would have been reposing in some win- 
dow on the rue de la Paix. Well, what 
then ? She paid him, did she not ? Must 
she like him into the bargain ? Her smiles 
were her own. 

I fell to wondering, as I stared about me, 
which of the women were the cocottes and 
which the honnetes femmes. Broadly speak- 
ing, the former were probably, as I have said, 
to be distinguished by their greater elegance; 
but the rule was a bit too sweeping. In the 
end I concluded that the cocottes were those 
who were eating ices, and the honnetes femmes 
those who were drinking tea ; for the first 
do as they please, but the second as it is proper 
to do ; and though the English have forced 
[ 144 ] 



Au Bois 

the custom upon them, the French have 
never honestly learned to reverence tea. 

Sitting alone at a table near mine, where 
I could watch her without turning my head, 
was a little demi-mondaine . She was very pretty. 
Her gown and hat were charming, her fea- 
tures behind her light veil were small and 
fine, and on her cheeks there was just the soft- 
est touch of rose, that I should have thought 
natural if it were not that such creamy com- 
plexions are usually colorless. She could not 
have been more than two or three and twenty. 
Yet she made a sadly pathetic little figure. 
It was not that she was alone. The maitre 
d' hotel had shown her especial courtesy, and 
a man who had been welcomed with a word 
of respectful recognition by more than one 
waiter had bowed and stopped for a moment 
to speak pleasantly with her. Indeed, her 
being here unaccompanied was rather a sign 
that her position was established. One goes 
to the Chateau de Madrid when one's fortune 
is made, — not to seek it. I should as soon 
[ 145 ] 



The Book of Paris 

have thought of accosting the girl with the 
middle-aged man as her. Neither did I fancy 
sentimentally that she was reflecting on ci- 
gales and winters. There are many ways of 
classifying people ; but one of the most use- 
ful, and perhaps the only universally accurate 
manner, is of dividing people into those who 
are and those who make believe. The pretty 
demi-mondaine was of the second category, 
and her pathos lay in the fact that she felt 
it. With her irreproachable gown, her well- 
chosen hat, and her tiny pompous spaniel 
that lay curled in a chair beside hers, and ate 
wafers from her hand, she was as complete 
as any of the others and prettier than most ; 
yet her slender fingers played nervously with 
the ivory handle of her small fluffy parasol, 
and her eyes were timid. If she could have 
understood intellectually that the difference 
between herself and the rest was not in ex- 
ternals but just in a shabby trick that Nature 
had played her, she might have learned not 
to show her consciousness of being a make- 
[ 146] 



Au Bois 

believe. But that consciousness came to 
her, I was sure, merely as a vague uneasi- 
ness. Her life was pure feeling. Reason was 
at least as foreign to her as to the little 
spaniel. And after all it may be she would 
not have made a success had she been differ- 
ent. Her charm, I reflected, lay precisely 
in her wistfulness. Very likely her life was 
happier than that of many who were not 
make-believes. Men are always gentle with 
such women. 

When the tea-hour was over and it was 
no longer fashionable to remain, I left the 
restaurant, and again crossing the Boulevard 
Richard Wallace, reentered the Bois. The 
paths were shadowy and very still now, and 
I wandered peacefully, without thought of 
direction, from one to another, until as even- 
ing began to fall I happened on the Restau- 
rant du Pre Catalan. I dined there agreeably 
out of doors, while a tolerable orchestra just 
within played Strauss waltzes and other deco- 
rative music. When I had finished, the sun 
[ 147 ] 



The Book of Paris 

was long set, and the moon, not yet quite at 
the full, was high. 

I set off again, taking a cab this time, in 
deference to the tradition that after dark the 
Bois is unsafe for pedestrians. A moment, 
and Pre Catalan with its lights and its laugh- 
ter had vanished like one of those enchanted 
palaces — scarcely more real indeed — in the 
" Arabian Nights." The tones of the orches- 
tra were audible for a little while, then they 
too died away, and there was nothing to break 
the moonlit silence of the allee we followed 
but the low murmur of leaves overhead, the 
rhythmic thudding of the horses' hoofs, and 
the soft whispering sound that the rubber tires 
of the open carriage made on the ground. I 
looked for a second at the squat inscrutable 
figure on the box before me, and wondered 
what thoughts were in his mind. It has often 
seemed strange to me that cochers^ whose op- 
portunities for observation and for solitude are 
immense and exactly equal, whose very me- 
tier it is to be alone in the midst of the chang- 
[ 148 ] 



Au Bois 

ing scene, should become wits rather than 
philosophers. Perhaps, I thought vaguely, 
they were witty because when on a course they 
crossed swiftly the path of some copain, or 
when their cab for an instant locked wheels 
with the wagon of an irate teamster, the mo- 
ment was too brief for any but terse epigram- 
matic phrases to tell. True, there was nothing 
to indicate that they were not philosophers 
also. But was that probable ? Men who were 
both wits and philosophers could rule Paris. 
All vocations were open to them ; they could 
succeed in anything. Well, perhaps they 
knew it, and preferred to remain cochers. If 
they were philosophers they were in pursuit 
of knowledge ; what other profession would 
offer so much ? And as to ruling Paris, it was 
matter for deliberation whether they did not 
rule it already. 

At night, in such a setting of silence and 

unreality, one's fancy frisks along unimpeded 

like one's thought in a dream, where there 

are none of the inhibitions of waking life. 

[ 149 ] 



The Book of Paris 

As in the dream, one's deductions are en- 
tirely logical and completely absurd because 
no sup-ffestion of common sense ever enters 
to modify the initial premise. Asleep, we 
should follow the idea to such a point of 
impossibility that when we waken, being 
unable to remember the steps by which we 
progressed, we should dismiss the result as 
sheer vagrant inanity (and this sometimes 
happens), if it were not that generally, be- 
fore one train of thought goes very far, some- 
thing happens — a breath of air touches our 
cheeks or a sound our ears — to change the 
current of the dream and establish a new 
point of departure. Inwaking life the thought 
can never be carried so far, since the possi- 
bilities for this something to arise are many 
times more numerous. 

So now when we had rounded a curve 
and I looked up to see Bagatelle a stone's 
throw away, cockers ceased to exist for me. 
It was no wonder. The little chateau shone 
as white and still as the moon herself, while 
[ 150] 



Cochers 



V^'l 



Au Bois 

on the terrace before it the shrubbery was a 
deep blue-black. All about rose the pop- 
lars, beautifully grouped by threes and fours 
that melted together indistinguishably, each 
group a splendid mass of pale light and lu- 
minous darkness, except where, high up, 
the feathery curving top of one or another 
emerged and trembled delicately, a blurred 
shadow against the sky. They would be won- 
derful by day ; but now, at night, they seemed 
the shivering wings of Beauty herself, poised 
for a little fugitively upon the earth. If I 
could only have stayed ! If I could have 
held it ! If I could have somehow become 
part of it! Yet I did not dare even to pause; 
for I knew that, after a moment, though a 
tender reverence for the scene would remain, 
the inspired perception, the acute sense of 
its loveliness, would be gone ; and the regret 
for what I had lost would be too poignant. 
What cry is bitterer than Coleridge's, " I 
see, not feel, how beautiful they are ! " 
Whether it is that before the almost tangi- 
[ 151 ] 



The Book of Paris 

ble presence of beauty we ache to merge 
ourselves, to lose our personality, — and that 
this would mean death, — 

" Now more than ever seems it rich to die. 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
In such an ecstasy," — 

while, in spite of ourselves, the overwhelm- 
ing instinct of life calls on us to maintain and 
strengthen our individuality, or whether the 
reason lies elsewhere, the sad truth is that 
intense emotion such as we then feel can 
come but by accident and endure but an in- 
stant. The next, the wax melts in the wings 
that would have carried us out of the world, 
and we fall, like Icarus, heavily upon our- 
selves. 

** Forlorn, the very word is like a bell 
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" 

No one has put it better than Keats. 

The gleaming chateau, the moonlit ter- 
race, and the poplars were gone now. "^ 
la Forte Maillot^' I said to the cocher^ 
wearily. 

[ 152] 



Au Bois 

"Ah," I thought, raising my head, "as 
the black night with stars, so the immense 
banahty of our lives is set with moments of 
feeling." 



Fiacres 



L,ove in Paris 



:4 




f -sty- 



'4' 




VI 

Love in Paris 

»EOPLE are wrong to leave Paris 
in summer. The impression that 
in that season the city becomes 
unbearably hot was, I fancy, 
spread by the English; for unless there is a 
slight chill about the air and draughts to sit 
in, the average Englishman begins to mop 
his forehead and complain of the heat. But 
to the man born in our country of rigorous 
extremes, the summer climate of Paris seems 
gentle and equable. (I have, moreover, rarely 
found an American who succeeded in being 
warm enough anywhere in Europe at no 
matter what time of year.) And Paris in 
August is worth knowing. If it has lost the 
sense of freshness and buoyancy it possessed 
in early spring and has not yet gained the 
[ 157] 



The Book of Paris 

delicate melancholy of its autumn nor its 
strange, poignant winter charm, there is, 
nevertheless, a lavish sleepy beauty about it, 
more attractive in this period, when one's 
mind is in abeyance and one lives only 
through his senses, than would be those sub- 
tler moods. The city belongs to one, too, in 
a way it does not at any other season. The 
wide boulevards are all but deserted ; the 
Place Vendome is bare and silent ; only a 
loitering omnibus and perhaps a tenantless 
cab or two interrupt the perspective of the 
rue Royale and the obelisk in the Place de 
la Concorde from the steps of the Made- 
leine ; one may even cross the Champs Ely- 
sees without risking his life; all the Paris 
world is at Trouville, Deauville, or some- 
where else. From time to time personally- 
conducted parties of tourists surge into the 
town and pause for a day or two in their 
relentless way across Europe, — Germans 
with guide-books, spectacles and green hats 
flaunting each a solitary feather, English (of 
[ 158] 



Love in Paris 

that class which likes the heat no more than 
another, but which has to travel now or not 
at all) with guide-books and pipes, and 
Americans with guide-books.' But they serve 
only to heighten one's sense of the city's 
emptiness — like rats in a vacant house. All 
this is in the day-time. At night everything 
is dilEerent ; for then the workers who have 
been hidden in shops, bureaux, government- 
offices, pour forth and overflow the streets 
in which an hour before one could hear the 
echo of his own footsteps, and fill with the 
murmur of their voices the gardens that 
have been silent since morning. 

Such is Paris in midsummer, and as such 
too I have grown to love it. If I go to the 
shore at all, it is in September, when I can 
possess unmolested the whole sea for half 
the price I must have paid to rent in dis- 
comfort a small fragment of it two months 

^ Further characterization of my summer-flitting countrymen 
is impossible. Their heterogeneity is immense and gorgeous. I 
thank heaven for the guide-books! 

[ 159] 



The Book of Paris 

earlier. And although no events break its 
agreeable monotony, a summer in Paris al- 
ways contains unforgettable days (when one 
did nothing very particular) that one looks 
back to affectionately, which, I suppose, is 
as good a test as another of a season hap- 
pily spent. 

The recollection of one of these from last 
August is still vivid for me. It began — that 
is to say, I begin to remember it — at about 
four in the afternoon, when I stood smok- 
ing a cigarette on the little balcony outside 
my sitting-room, my elbows resting on the 
iron railing, — for all the world, it occurred 
to me with pleasant self-deceit, like Chad 
in "The Ambassadors." Sunlight permeated 
everything. The river was a dazzling blue; 
its bridges a warm golden brown. The low 
hum of mature summer filled the air. It was 
a drowsy indolent day, and yet — beneath its 
seeming peacefulness there was to be felt an 
immense and restless vitality, like that of 
which one becomes sometimes aware in the 
[ i6o ] 



La Lettre d" Amour 



Love in Paris 

lazy feline glance from between the half- 
elosed eyelids of a languorous woman. Its 
effect on me was strangely to make me feel 
at once happy and discontented, and (para- 
doxical as it may sound) as though, if I were 
more contented, I should be less happy. I 
wanted something and did not know what. 
On reflection it seemed that it might be 
gingerbread with raisins in. When one ex- 
periences this desperate baffling desire for 
something he cannot name (and everyone 
knows the feeling), it is always a dainty he 
loved as a child that seems most nearly to 
approximate the object of his longing; for 
the simple luxuries of childhood were cou- 
pled with sensations more vivid and en- 
chanted than any the most complex plea- 
sures can give us now. As for the object of 
my own wish, it might as well have been a 
roc's ^%%\ pain d'epice is very unlike ginger- 
bread. Beyond the quay a little bateau 
mouche swept by silently on its way down 
stream to Suresnes ; then another and another, 
[ i6i ] 



^lx Book of l\nis 

:iiul 1 noted with surprise that their ilciks 
were hlaek uitli passengers. It must be Sat- 
urilav ; on the whole I heheveil it was. Anil 
sinee a lari;e part oi the pc^pulation ol Paris 
secmeil to In* i'oinr down the river, why 
shoulil not I go tcHir 

There are those whom the [Moximitv oi 
a erow il renders unhapp\ , who exjUTience 
distaste tor its viilgaritv and paii\ at its ugli- 
ness, Unless the reNulsion is a pose, they are 
not to be despised tor it \\\o sincere teel- 
ing is despieable), but they are to be pitied, 
Through this innate or eultivated atroj-thy 
i>t one side ot their natine they are out o\\ 
trom that unity ot impression by whieh an 
uuilerstanding ot a city is expressed. IMiev 
may eompletely appreciate a Norman land- 
seape; Paris they \\ ill ne\ er know. 1'\m' one 
knetws a eity in a prolvnnul and signitieant 
sense, not when one has beeome familiar 
with its museums, parks, and aneient streets, 
— all this serves as hitle as an aequaintanee 
with anatomy would serve toward a philo- 
I 'o_> I 



Love in Paris 

sophic understanding of man's nature ; — but 
when one has come to feel a great, if vague, 
good-will, an honest friendly sympathy, and 
above all, a pity in which there is no conde- 
scension for the commonplace unromantic 
human beings who jostle past him on the 
city's sidewalks. It is because I have never 
reached this state of mind in London that 
the English metropolis remains for me an 
admitted enigma. The men I have known 
who confessed to this distaste for the popu- 
lace were avowedly seekers after beauty, and 
it was, they averred, the bitter ugliness they 
saw in the crowd that offended them. Yet, 
conceding as reasonable such singleness of 
quest, and acknowledging the emotional sen- 
sitiveness to which they all pretend, I find 
them singularly warped and narrow even in 
their own specialized department of feeling. 
There are so many kinds of beauty; it exists 
everywhere, gleaming out at one often from 
ugliness itself. Surely the aesthete's life would 
be richer if he would only see the beauty, 
[ 163 ] ' 



"The Book of Paris 

fragmentary as it is, in the common everyday 
things. 

It was the variegated aspect of the deck 
of the little boat to which I stepped from 
the Passy landing that started such random 
thoughts. With my back against the rail I 
stood and watched the spectacle, — people 
wedged along the inadequate benches, people 
in the aisles between, chatting, smoking, 
crowding against one another and me ; mak- 
ing broad jokes and bursting into roars of 
laughter over them ; breaking into swift 
quarrels to which some flash of wit in the re- 
marks bandied hotly back and forth brought 
swifter reconciliation ; espousing the disputes 
of others ; soldiers, clerks, shop-keepers, 
women young and gay, women old and so 
superlatively ugly that they could be nothing 
but oiivreiises{xov[\ some theatre, and set one in- 
stinctively groping for a fifty-centime piece ; 
babies with wide curious eyes and sticky 
mouths; servant maids, — just people, in 
short, and at every new landing more people, 
[ 164 ] 



Love in Paris 

their expression changing from tense appre- 
hension, as the boat slowly neared the wharf, 
to relief and placid self-congratulation, when 
it had touched and they had struggled aboard. 
There was not a handsome face to be seen, 
nor a dainty gown, nor a graceful gesture, 
— yet there was a homely beauty about it all. 
What an esthete would have felt it is diffi- 
cult to divine, — I am afraid of doing injus- 
tice to his point of view; but no one else 
could have considered this careless, happy, 
vulgar, holiday multitude without experienc- 
ing pleasure at its frank enjoyment and a 
sympathetic curiosity as to the lives of the 
individuals who composed it. 

Some one (perhaps it was Thackeray) 
wrote wistfully of what a spectacle of hu- 
manity we should have if the roofs of the 
houses in a city were removed and we could 
hover above looking down into each. There 
is a charm about the idea like that investing 
the magical attributes of the prince in a fairy 
tale ; but after all we should learn from such 
[ 165 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

a survey little more than we know already. 
If instead we could see into the minds, now 
so infinitely removed, of the men and women 
swarming all about us, — could see the hopes 
and the doubts, the base desires, the high 
aspirations, the nobility and the ignominy 
struggling confusedly in each, — then what 
a spectacle indeed we should get ! Our own 
minds, I think, would be sweetened and 
purified by such insight, full of tolerance, 
and with no room left in the sadness of so 
immense a knowledge for any emotion ex- 
cept the profound passion of pity which 
touches us now only rarely and faintly; we 
should not be men but demi-gods. If you 
doubt so much, you have only to look into 
the face of some old Catholic priest of the 
best type. And yet he, sitting day after day 
in the confessional, has not learned a tenth 
of the truth, even as to those penitents who 
stammer their sins brokenly into his ear. 

These reflections pertained to the initial 
stage of the trip. Afterwards, before we had 
[ i66] 



Love in Paris 

even come in sight of the smug ubiquitous 
statue of Liberty, I fell into the grasp of a 
different more precise feeling, — a kind of 
apologetic sense of being out of place, an 
intruder ; for when the inevitable first five 
minutes of inability to see a crowed of which 
one is a part, except as a confused whole, only 
vaguely composed of parts, were over, and I 
had begun to consider the elements of the 
scene separately, I found that this multitude 
did not analyze into individuals but into 
pairs. The idea seemed, to begin with, so 
absurdly literary that I fancied I had fallen 
on exceptions and was generalizing from in- 
sufficient material, — a not uncommon fault, 
— and so abandoned my place at the rail for 
a wider survey ; but before I had made my 
way curiously half round the deck, I was 
fairly swamped with proofs. There never 
was such another truth as that ! A philoso- 
pher would have turned green at its abso- 
luteness and a grammarian would have died 
of envy. These people, whether occupying 
[ 167] 



"The Book of Paris 

the benches, resting against the rail, or ebb- 
ing to and fro in the space between, were 
without exception not ones but twos. Every 
soldier had his bonne amie, every clerk his 
mistress, every shop-keeper his wife. In all 
the throng the pilot, the man who collects 
the fares, the engineer, and I were the only 
individuals. 

It did not matter to the other three, doubt- 
less, who had their duties to attend to ; but 
me it filled with a sense of my obtrusive- 
ness that was almost embarrassment. I felt 
like a chaperon on a picnic. Not for the 
world would I have annoyed these merry- 
makers, yet I had to look somewhere, and 
I saw in growing consternation that I could 
turn my gaze nowhere except to the river 
without breaking in upon a flirtation, a love- 
affair, or a family council. Then, at the very 
height of my quandary, something kindly 
happened to set me at ease. On the bench 
opposite, a young soldier, who was sitting 
with his arm about a little servant-girl, looked 
[ i68 ] 



Le Modele 



,.AVf\ 




^' 



Love in Paris 

up after a whispered confidence (which must 
have been mischievous; for she had uttered 
a low giggle of protesting pleasure), caught 
my eye, saw that I was looking at him, gave 
me a stare devoid of interest, resentment, or 
sheepishness, turned back to his mate, and 
kissed her soberly (behind the ear). There 
was neither bravado nor defiance of my ob- 
servation in the act. He simply did not care. 
Incredible as it seems to an Anglo-Saxon, 
he did not; neither did any of the other two 
or three hundred people on that boat. I 
stared now right and left for fifteen minutes, 
but I might have been a stuffed cat in a cellar 
and they sportive mice, for all they minded. 
It was an instructive quarter of an hour, and 
as amusing as a story of Courteline's ; but at 
the end of it I turned away with a sudden 
inexplicable petulance and took to regard- 
ing the river. I thought again of ginger- 
bread with raisins in. 

The machine-shops and the factories were 
past now. We had reached the outer edge 
[ 169] 



The Book of Paris 

of that desolate and sordid circle which 
makes Paris a jewel set in mud. Where the 
Seine curves more sharply, we stole in be- 
tween the islands of Billancourt and Seguin. 
The river here was as smooth as the sky, 
only rippling into one soft diagonal fold 
where the bow of the boat cut it. The tall 
slim poplars on the He Seguin were repeated 
line for line in the water beneath, but less 
delicate, less softly green above than below, 
as an idea of a thing is always lovelier than 
the thing itself. A silence had fallen upon 
the deck, but not the silence of reflection 
and resignation an autumn afternoon would 
bring. Out of this radiant, perfect, fruitful 
day there stole to one who looked a sense 
of vibrant, exultant joy in existence. I felt 
it shudder through me and knew, though I 
did not look round, that the others felt it 
too, and that the soldier had tightened his 
arm about the waist of his bonne amie. 

Saint-Cloud finally, and every one strug- 
gling to disembark at once. The boat would 
[ 170 ] 



Love in Paris 

go on still to Suresnes, but not I, with the 
nearer prospect of the park, the wood, and 
the cascades before me. Besides, to go far- 
ther would be, through the vagaries of the 
river, to draw nearer the city. The crowd 
knew best. 

He who has not seen Saint-Cloud is to be 
pitied. Saint-Germain with its forest, its 
castle, and the wide view from its high ter- 
race, is nobler, Chantilly is more exquisite, 
but Saint-Cloud is the most human. It is so 
close to Paris, — only three sous away by 
boat, — and there is an ironic amusement in 
the thought that the common people come 
and go now just as formerly the court came 
and went. There is no illusion of country 
to be had here. Even when lying in the high 
grass, with all about one the green trunks of 
trees supporting a foliage so thick that the 
sunlight cannot penetrate directly, but steals 
through the translucent leaves in a soft dis- 
seminated haze, one is aware, beneath the 
buzzing of the bees and the thousand deli- 
[ 171 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

cate forest-sounds, of the low hum of the 
city; from the edge of the wooded hill 
above the cascade the Eiffel Tower, the 
white cupolas of the Sacre Coeur, and the 
dome of the Invalides, are to be seen, 
dwarfed but distinct. This closeness in touch 
with life is what I most love about Saint- 
Cloud. Landscapes are painted without fig- 
ures or with vague unreal ones; we are 
accustomed to think of natural beauty and 
actual prosaic existence as incompatible. 
Saint-Cloud proves that they are not. The 
final effect, to be sure, is that of a compro- 
mise; but if in the adjustment beauty is not 
at its highest, far less is existence at its dull- 
est; what the one has lost the other has 
more than gained. At Versailles I am con- 
scious of a pang of unhappiness in the sight 
of these black-trousered-and-coated men and 
dingily dressed women swarming about the 
fountains and up the steps of the Little Tri- 
anon. It is not so much that they are ugly, 
— though from a decorative point of view 
[ 172 ] 



Love in Paris 

they are, — as that there, where the memo- 
ries of the gorgeous aristocratic past cling 
about everything, they — and I — are des- 
perately out of place. But at Saint-Cloud, 
where the aroma of the past is only a faint 
lingering perfume and the present is all 
about one, I would not permanently ex- 
change the spectacle of these working-men 
and shop-girls for the presence of the lords 
and ladies of the court, who wandered here 
sometimes under Louis XVI, making love 
lightly, whispering assertions of eternal en- 
durance for passions that would last a month 
— or less; behaving, in short, for all their 
grace and breeding, in much the same man- 
ner as this canaille they would have despised. 
Meanwhile I strolled on, climbing the 
hill, and getting always farther into the 
wood. Sometimes I would emerge upon a 
clearing that would be all ablaze with pop- 
pies ; but whether in meadow or forest, ev- 
erywhere there were people, and always by 
twos except when there were children to 
[ 173 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

augment the number. Once, in a sunny little 
hollow, I came upon a party of three, — a 
man, a woman, and a baby. The man lay on 
his back, his coat off and rolled under his 
head for a pillow. He had covered his face 
with a red handkerchief and was slumbering 
in heavy stertorous content. It was hot. The 
woman had removed her shirt-waist and sat, 
her brown arms and shoulders glistening, her 
head bent over, and her hands resting on the 
ground. She looked up as I passed and stared 
at me without embarrassment. Why should 
she have been ashamed ? Clothes were made 
to keep the cold from our bodies — for no- 
thing else. She was right, I thought. When 
her clothes had changed from a blessing to a 
discomfort, she simply took them off with- 
out shame. She was right, for she was nat- 
ural. It was I who was wrong, for not daring 
to do as much. 

I threw myself down at last beneath some 
great elms, in the green twilight of whose 
shadow I could lie and yet gaze out upon a 
[ 174] 



Love in Paris 

sunny meadow beyond, that fairly flamed 
with the sleepy red flowers. Here surely I 
should be spying on no one (the scruple was 
for myself) ; but I had scarcely stretched 
myself on the ground, when I became aware 
of a murmur of voices drifting to me from a 
near-by thicket, and despite myself I began 
turning the sounds into words. (One's ears, 
it would seem, have no connection with 
one's conscience.) 

" Mais si, — encore plus. Tu le sais bien. 
It's you who love me less — " 

"I! — Ah, Jacques!" 

And so forth. 

Banal ? Yes, profoundly, limitlessly banal ; 
and in being so, very characteristic of Saint- 
Cloud. You must not go to Saint-Cloud to 
find a bright new idea that no one has ever 
had before. You will find only the old ones 
there that all people have in common. That 
is why Saint-Cloud is so important. We pass 
our lives in a futile attempt to avoid the 
banal. The fear of having feelings, and espe- 
[ 175 ] 



I'bc Book ()f Paris 

cially thoui^hts, thiit others h;ivc had is a 
huuhcar to us. Oui I'oal is to he as JilUMont 
as pOvSsihlc lri>tn cvri v one else — orii^inal, in 
short. We ilv> not see, or seeini; do not leel, 
that the vital uleas ami einotii>ns are just 
those we have in eonuuon — -that all the 
rest have little value. The man who quotes 
proverhs is insupportahle, it is true; hut that 
is not heeause he expresses thcuights thou- 
sands ivt men have had, hut heeause he is not 
thinking- at all, onlv making helieve to think, 
with his parriU-like repetition ol a ready- 
made phrase. It is exasperating; to he told 
that a rollings stiMie g^atheis no moss; hut to 
heat' the same tamiliar truth expressed in 
>\ orils that shi>\\ the tlunight io exist in the 
speaker's mini! is not exasperating. The dil- 
licultv is, not to lose sight oi the signiticance 
ot the hanal. not to tiiul people less interest- 
im; heeause thev resemhle one another, not 
to tuivl dailv happenings any the less u onder- 
tul that thev are dailv ; io keejt always hc- 
iore us the marvelous quality oi tlie usual. 
[ 176] 



Love in Paris 

"What a character for a book ! " we think, 
— we petty scribblers, — when every once 
in a while we meet an eccentric. Not at all. 
There is no need to put hinn in a book ; there 
is nothing to explain. His peculiarities have, 
just because they are peculiarities, but slight 
bearing on life; to transcribe them is a mat- 
ter of photography. The great novelist is he 
who takes the common experience of ordi- 
nary people, and so vitalizes and interprets it 
as to make us, for the moment at least, see 
it as the wealth it really is. Only, when such 
a one arrives, we are too stupid to under- 
stand that he has but made evident the mean- 
ing of old formulas, and praise him for his 
new ideas. 

The drowsy babble of the lovers' voices 
made my eyes droop, and I fell asleep. — 
When I awoke the shadows were long and 
cool, and the poppies glowed more dully in 
the field. I looked at my watch : it was 
nearly seven. So I strolled down out of the 
wood and the gardens into the village, and 
[ ^77 ] 



T^he Book of Paris 

followed the quay until I had reached the 
Restaurant Belvedere. I could not go wrong 
in dining here ; for the wide terrasse was 
covered with little tables at which, always in 
pairs, were half the people I had seen on the 
boat. But I found a vacant place, slipped 
into it, and sat with my eyes half-closed, 
gazing across at the Bois de Boulogne that 
swept its greenness graciously down to the 
river. It was twilight. The warm evening 
breeze had sprung up, stirring my hair softly, 
but filling me somehow with a wistful dis- 
content. 

^^ Monsieur desire V asked the waiter re- 
spectfully. 

" Gingerbread with raisins in," I replied 
absently. I was not quite awake yet. 

*^ Monsieur??" 

" Oh ! " — I started. " Je veux diner. Don't 
ask me. Bring me anything, — only not 
chicken." 

** Bien, monsieur." 

He might have cheated me, — I was in no 
[ 178] 



Love in Paris 

mind to quibble about money, — but I do 
not think he did; not much anyway. I sat 
for a long time over the dinner, eating me- 
chanically, sipping the delicate bordeaux 
(I was less vague in ordering the bordeaux), 
and watching the sky fade from gold to 
mauve. It came to me suddenly that I had 
dreamed something very beautiful asleep on 
the hill, but I could not recall what. Only 
the mood of the dream remained, haunt- 
ingly delicate. The dreams we cannot re- 
member are always the loveliest. Across the 
Seine the poplars had faded to silver gray 
and their reflections were blurred together 
in the water. Lights began to show here and 
there. If there had been something perturb- 
ing about the day, what can I say of the 
evening ? Its beauty ached through one like 
pain. I pushed back my chair at last on the 
crackling gravel, paid the bill hastily, and 
walked away, followed for some little time 
by the other diners' voices, high and slender 
through the still air. 

[ 179 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

The little tramway of the Val d'Or car- 
ries one swiftly back to Paris from the neigh- 
borhood of Saint-Cloud, through and beside 
the Bois. Yet if you asked me for advice I 
should hardly dare counsel you to take it at 
half-past eight of an August evening. Beau- 
tiful as the ride is then, it is a thousand times 
more melancholy. There were few other 
passengers in the tram with me. A man and 
his wife, she dozing, her head resting on her 
husband's shoulder, and two sleeping babies 
sprawling in tangled confusion over the legs 
of both parents, were all, during most of the 
trip. As we fled onward through the wood, 
the lamps of the open car spread a dim cir- 
cle of light about us, evoking strange shadows 
and the ghosts of trees. But the effect of 
even this was not so profoundly sad as the 
impression I got when we whirled swiftly 
past some brightly illuminated restaurant 
(like that of the Chateau de Madrid) and 
caught for an instant the tinkle of laughter 
and the clatter of plate and glass. 
[ i8o ] 



Cafe in the Bois 



Love in Paris 

At the Porte Maillot I descended. The 
depression was lost in the brilliancy of the 
reentered city ; instead, I was conscious of a 
reaction into exhilaration. It seemed incred- 
ible that there were Parisians still left at Saint- 
Cloud. The popular impression (that became 
promptly mine) was, clearly, that it would 
be folly to be at home on a night like this, 
so I took a cab and drove slowly down the 
Avenue de la Grande Armee and the Champs 
Elysees, That wide white pleasure street was 
flecked with open carriages. Not the splen- 
did equipages that fill it to overflowing in 
winter, but dingy democratic sapins like the 
one I rode in. Cab after cab approached, 
met mine, and rolled by, all at so nearly 
identical a rate of motion that to watch 
them was like watching floating chips of 
wood in a river ; and on a careful average 
five out of six held each a pair of lovers. 
Unless you have yourself driven down the 
Champs Elysees of an August night I de- 
spair of making you believe that, — because 
[ i8i ] 



The Book of Paris 

it is true, and truth, whether stranger or not, 
is less plausible than fiction, which is con- 
structed with especial reference to being 
believed. If, furthermore, you ask me how 
I knew that the couples I saw were lovers, I 
reply that no mistake was possible. 

The lack of self-consciousness in these 
Parisians, and their admirable unconcern for 
what others might think, set me marveling 
once more. I had often wondered why in 
Paris one should be conscious of a harmony, 
a perpetually reinforced unity of impression, 
that one misses in other large cities. The 
explanation was clear enough now : it was 
because the people of Paris were in keeping 
with their surroundings. (And I saw that 
this also had been at the root of my liking 
for Saint-Cloud.) True, the pressure of mid- 
dle-class philistinism is to be felt here as 
elsewhere ; but whereas in London its de- 
pressing influence is paramount, here it is 
only a minor force struggling against the 
spirit of Paris, which is pagan, and which 
[ 182] 



Love in Paris 

on such a night as this rises like a great flood, 
sweeping everything before it. Here was a 
night that fairly besought one to love. Not 
a sound in the air, not a soft breath from the 
warm breeze, like the touch of a woman's 
fingers on one's cheek, that spoke of any- 
thing else. Anglo-Saxon lovers would have 
resisted the appeal and sat stiffly side by side 
without daring to embrace, for fear of "what 
people might think " ; or at least would have 
awaited a dark turning. But in Paris what 
is natural is not to be ashamed of. French 
philosophers reason this out, French poets 
sing it (scarcely a year goes by that some 
new symbolic play in verse depicting the 
struggles of pagan Nature and Christian as- 
ceticism, the sympathy all with the former, 
is not produced at the Odeon), and, more 
important, because a surer index to the real 
spirit of the race, the masses feel it. Perhaps 
the truth is that there is rather an esthetic 
than a moral ideal in France, that beauty 
takes precedence over right. If there is any 
[ 183 ] 



The Book of Paris 

justice in so broad a generalization I am not 
sure that the French ideal is not the more 
trustworthy. (I do not like professed aes- 
thetes ; but that is because they have nar- 
rowed and warped the meaning of beauty.) 
For while the words "right" and "wrong" 
have, it would seem, only a relative signifi- 
cance, and are even at that so confused that 
half the time we cannot decide which is 
which, beauty stands out as something abso- 
lute ; our individual conceptions of it, as we 
grow in fineness of feeling, resemble each 
other strangely. Not that I believe the lov- 
ers in the taxi-cabs to have been behaving 
as they did for such reasons. Oh dear, no ! 
Most of them probably did not know how 
to reason, and anyway they had no time. 
Nevertheless I felt that they were acting — 
by instinct, if you will, — harmoniously (and 
harmony is the first law of beauty), instead 
of being consciously good. For on much of 
the affection that came under my eyes this 
August evening — particularly on that dis- 
[ 184] 



Love in Paris 

played the most intensely — I fear that the 
Church would have frowned. 

Through all the mile-long splendor of the 
avenue, the carriages followed one another 
a few yards apart, — black, shabby, ordinary, 
like actors in street-dress rehearsing on a 
stage set for a drama of gods. Paris was very 
like Saint-Cloud in its humanity — or per- 
haps it was Saint-Cloud that resembled Paris : 
for in this white sweeping drive, befitting 
the pomp and luxury of a princely caval- 
cade, these hackney cabs and their unaristo- 
cratic occupants were not out of place. 

In the long vista 2ijiacre, still far away, 
appeared somehow taller and more shadowy 
than the others ; as it approached it resolved 
itself into one like the rest, but the hood of 
which had been raised. Within were a cou- 
ple exchanging the most frantic kisses I had 
yet remarked, and with such desperate ra- 
pidity that one thrilled at the thought of 
the number they would have achieved by 
the time they reached the Place de TEtoile. 
[ 185 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

I lay back on my cushions and laughed and 
laughed. For do you think they had raised 
the hood in an attempt at concealment? 
Not they! In the event of an extremely 
obliging rain, or of a pedestrian's tardy de- 
sire to stare, once you are well past him, the 
hood of your Parisian cab is of some little 
service. As protection from the prompter 
gaze of loungers or that of the occupants of 
other vehicles, it is worse than useless. Not 
only does it disguise nothing, but the fact 
of its being up in fine weather is the signal 
for a close and curious inspection by all 
within range. No, this superlatively amo- 
rous pair had raised it in the pretense that 
they believed they were doing something 
wrong, and did not want to be seen; in the 
effort to realize the intoxicating impression 
of secret sin. I could only laugh in appre- 
ciation of the refinement ; but a more seri- 
ous observer might have frowned. For there 
was more of what is bad about Paris in this 
subterfuge than is at first apparent. If Paris 
[ 186] 



Love in Paris 

were thoroughly pagan, it would be as 
moral a city as exists ; moreover, it would 
have a morality to which an intelligent man 
could assent. But it is not. That the sex- 
relation between people not united in mar- 
riage is more facile here than elsewhere seems 
to me at times a step away from the unnat- 
uralness of monogamy (it is only convention 
that makes polygamy vile) and so right. 
What is bad is that in theory it is still held 
to be wrong. From the resulting paradox 
there is derived that unwholesome sophisti- 
cated pleasure that invests an act at once 
officially considered wicked and not person- 
ally felt to be so. And the children? Yes, 
that is the difficulty. We have a long way 
to go before a satisfactory system of poly- 
gamy can be established. 

But the lovers' carriage was gone, and I 
was conscious again of the strange discon- 
tent, stronger now, sweeping in upon me 
like a great wave. The mood of the night 
was too overpoweringly complete, its pres- 
[ 187] 



The Book of Paris 

sure too intense. It was like the persistent 
throbbing of one note in a symphony. I 
touched the cocker s arm with my stick, and 
bade him drive me home. 

"It is instructive," I said to myself when 
I stood once more on my little balcony, "to 
watch from outside. If you had been part 
of this day, my friend, you would not have 
understood it." 

I had spoken aloud to convince myself 
that what I said was true; but the lack of 
enthusiasm in my voice was too apparent, 
and suddenly, without quite knowing how, 
I found myself within at my table. 

"My dear Linette," I wrote, " I was out 
at Saint-Cloud to-day — all alone. It was 
very beautiful, and there were red poppies 
everywhere. But I was unhappy: for I re- 
membered when I had the poppies and you 
too, ma petite Linette. Have you forgot- 
ten ? If you have nothing better to do to- 
morrow, I wonder w^hether you would not 
care to — " 



Linette 



'Towers of St. Sulpice 



'i-i\(^«?> Xt\^ l^t^WoT 



In my Court 













"^■4- - 



VII 



In My Court 




HE horse-chestnuts in the court 
beneath my bed-room window 
have been bare a long time, but 
there are still some leaves left on 
the elms. There will be few, though, by 
to-morrow, for the mid-October wind has 
caught them and sends them whirling down- 
ward. They sweep over the hard ground, 
curl like brown foam from the tops of the 
neat piles into which the concierge has raked 
them, and rustle across the green benches on 
which the nurses knit in the morning and 
the bourgeois read their papers in the late 
afternoon. The children are wild with joy. 
Calling to one another exultantly, they plow 
their way back and forth through the crack- 
ling heaps of leaves, and clutch them up by 
[ 191 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

the handful to let them fall again in showers 
of dull red and tarnished gold. There are 
two who do nothing but roll persistently all 
day long. From time to time their nurses 
desert the knitting, to rush across volubly 
and drag them to their feet ; but no power 
on earth can keep them long upright, and 
left to themselves they flop to the ground 
and roll again, silently and deliriously. The 
high thin voices of the others rise to me as I 
stand at my bed-room window. I like chil- 
dren, and they sometimes like me, — not al- 
ways, but a little oftener than their elders 
do perhaps, — because I do not feel either 
condescension or embarrassment in their 
presence ; but to-day \ would not go into 
the court. The frankness with which chil- 
dren forget is almost as painful as the hypoc- 
risy with which their parents pretend not to 
have forgotten. 

I used frequently to sit there last summer 
with the muffled sound of Paris in my ears 
and the thought of Paris in my mind, while 
[ 192 ] 



In the Garden of the Luxembourg 




^■= 



In My Court 

the sunlight crept along the bench, and the 
children played their games around me. 
Sometimes I would awake with a start 
to find my seat a house to which a visit 
was being paid, or an automobile speeding 
through the Bois, and then I would inquire 
whether I were in the way, and the children 
would chorus courteously, " Oh, not at all, 
monsieur! Ne vous derangez pas, monsieur'' ; 
after which I would forget them again, and 
they me. 

At other times, when the play was less 
intense, I would have scraps of conversation 
with one or another. A little blonde girl of 
ten, with a severe dignity of manner that 
sometimes deserted her when the games were 
exciting, spoke earnestly with me about the 
weather, and informed me often and with 
pride that she, her parents, and three minor 
members of her family — all equally blonde, 
but of degrees of dignity diminishing mathe- 
matically with their ages, clear to the young- 
est, who was four and not dignified at all — 
[ 193 ] 



The Book of Paris 

were soon to go to the country for a few 
weeks. In Paris the words "j/V vats passer 
qiielques sef?iaines a la ca?npagne" are as im- 
pressive as *' I am going to run down to my 
country-house," in America. I learned later 
that the destination of the blonde family was 
only Saint-Denis. But at ten one has not yet 
begun to make invidious distinctions. There 
is Paris and there is the country. Saint- 
Denis means no less than Trouville. 

There were many other children who 
played in the court, — for the house was large 
and the apartments were numerous ; but there 
was one so different from the others that I fell 
into the habit of looking up from my book 
to watch him when he was there, and of 
wondering about his absence when he was 
not. He was a child of six, with an oval face, 
chestnut curls that he had an odd little way 
of shaking back from his forehead, and large 
brown eyes strangely flecked with gold. No 
one was ever more unmistakably an aristo- 
crat than this six-year-old boy. The uncon- 
[ 194 ] 



In My Court 

scious grace of movement, the gentleness of 
manner, the instinctive courtesy, which, if 
anything tangible, are the signs of aristoc- 
racy — he possessed them all; and yet his 
name was just Etienne Dupont, and Dupont 
carries with it about as much connotative 
distinction in French as Jones in English. 
To me, aristocracy, or what I mean by it, — 
for no word has so many varying interpre- 
tations, — seems one of the most gracious 
things in life, bringing out the charm in 
commonplaces, lending beauty to a word or 
a glance, lingering like a perfume above bare 
existence. Impossible of adequate definition, 
it is the Something-Else like that which re- 
mains in a picture after one has analyzed it. 
The more I have looked for and found it, 
the more certain I have become that aristoc- 
racy is never acquired, always a matter of 
birth, but not at all a matter of family. It 
is perhaps a fair presumption that aristocrats 
are more likely to come of a stock which 
has already produced many ; but roturiers are 
[ 195 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

born every day into families which have 
been noble since the crusades, and aristocrats 
into those that dwell in tenements, or — 
which is more astounding — into those of 
the lower-middle-class. So the miracle was 
not that Etienne's name should have been 
Dupont, but that there should have been no- 
thing to explain the child in the father. He 
was a stout red-faced man, kindly, I was 
sure, but with a frank love of vulgarity, 
if I might judge from the stories I over- 
heard him relating to other fathers and from 
his gross resounding laugh. He was a clerk 
in the office of the mayor of the arrondisse- 
ment. Do not think me unjust toward Mon- 
sieur Dupont. I was not dismissing him as a 
man — only as an aristocrat. Aristocracy is 
not one of the things that it takes long study 
to discern, like courage or character. It is a 
kind of fineness that reveals itself in a thou- 
sand ways, and is as easily discernible in a 
man at first sight as after a long intimacy. I 
did not know the mother, — she had been 
[ 196 ] 



In My Court 

dead five years ; but I inquired about her of 
the Httle old man with the skull-cap. He 
has lived for longer than he can remember 
in the house and has observed three genera- 
tions of its inhabitants. 

" Cetait une brave femmey^ he said, ^* petite, 
grasse, bavarde — non, pas du tout distinguee. 
Elk ressemblait beaucoup a son mart, A strange 
child, le petit, to be born of such parents, 
riest-ce pasV^ 

Somehow the answer pleased me. I liked 
to think of Etienne as a changeling. The se- 
cret may, however, have been, that I could 
not follow Monsieur and Madame Dupont 
back to their own childhood. Nothing is so 
fragile, so easily lost, as the strange quality 
that produces this delicacy of sentiment, this 
charm of manner. Rare gift of the gods as 
it is, it should be immortal; but it is not. It 
is an exquisite flower that must be carefully 
tended if it is to live. In one of Mr. Leonard 
Merrick's novels (which I am amazed that so 
few Americans have read ; for it is as delight- 
[ 197 ] 



The Book of Paris 

ful as a fairy tale and as true as a syllogism) 
the hero, being in quest of his youth, remem- 
bers a little girl with whom he had played as a 
child, and who possessed that gentle distinc- 
tion (though he did not give it a name) which 
so charmed me in Etienne. He sought her 
out and found — a vain, shallow-minded wo- 
man, with a loud voice, a simper, and a habit 
of noise. It seemed improbable that the Mon- 
sieur Dupont whom I saw occasionally in the 
court, with his jovial bonhomie , and his com- 
monness, could ever have had anything of the 
fineness I saw in his son ; but it was not im- 
possible. Even Etienne might some day be- 
come — but I refused to consider that. 

Etienne was not forward in play, but rather 
retiring. He was in no sense the leader of his 
comrades — the little girl of the yellow pig- 
tails was that. Nevertheless there was in the 
attitude of the other children toward him a 
gentleness that was almost deference. Just 
as, when we talk with a man whose English is 
choice and beautiful, we find our own words 
[ 198 ] 



In My Court 

becoming more careful, so with this child 
of six the manners of his playmates were no- 
ticeably better than with one another. The 
youngest of the blonde children might fall 
on his face and wail unheeded ; but I saw 
the most boisterous young scapegrace in the 
court turn once with a swift solicitous, " Tu 
ne fes pas fait mal, Etienne?'' when in a 
rough game the latter had been thrown to 
the ground. 

The child, I remarked, as I watched him 
more closely, had another quality apart from 
his aristocracy — imagination. It was not he 
who led the games, but it was he who created 
them ; and if some of his inventions were 
puerile, I could not but admire the compli- 
cated originality of others. He did not speak 
to me except to wish me *' Bon jour,'' or ^* Bon 
soir,'' with a shy smile so radiant that it seemed 
to me pure sunlight ; but seeing the interest 
I was too clumsy not to show for his produc- 
tions, he would cast me from time to time a 
deprecating, half-appealing glance in which 
[ 199 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

there was something of the poet reading his 
verses. Then one day he discovered the game 
of Ogre, a game so complex, so involved, that 
I despair of making it clear to you. As the 
exposition of the game progressed, a rever- 
ent silence fell upon the listeners. Etienne's 
face glowed with inspiration, and he spoke 
breathlessly, finding successive rules as Shel- 
ley must have found successive words for 
"The Skylark." It will be enough for you 
to know that an ogre inhabited a castle 
(otherwise one of the green benches) which 
he, being lame, could not leave. But the cas- 
tle was situate in a thick forest where many 
travelers lost their way. (I would stake all I 
have that Etienne had never read "The Pil- 
grim's Progress.") Unaware that the castle 
was so dreadfully occupied, they would wel- 
come the sight of it joyfully, and, knocking 
for admittance, would, under certain condi- 
tions, be captured ; under others, set aside to 
fatten ; and under still others (most diffi- 
cult), actually eaten. They would then, if 

[ 200 ] 



Old Court in Rue Vercingetorix 




k-^^^r- • ,-.=i,t~' "-— -v- Sl^i Ji- 



mjf^mf^'^^^ 



'V^.,rtt 




In My Court 

uneaten, be rescued by knights of Charle- 
magne's court ; if eaten, brought to life by 
a good fairy who could put the ogre to sleep 
with a certain magic formula. This will suf- 
fice, but this was not all. The complications 
of the game were innumerable. My brain 
reeled at the magnificence of the conception. 

"But," asked the little girl of the blonde 
pig-tails with her matter-of-fact voice (and 
the answer to the question was implied in 
her tone), "but who shall be the ogre?" 

There was a chorus of " MoiV' " MoiV' 
*^Moi!" but Etienne shook his head firmly. 
"No," he said, coming toward my bench, 
and looking straight at me out of his great 
brown eyes in which the tiny points of yel- 
low shone like little gold stars, "monsieur 
will be the ogre." 

The others drew back with a sudden re- 
straint that was one fourth the hostility of 
little savages toward an intruder, and three 
fourths the sheepishness of miniature bour- 
geois shocked by an outraged rule of conduct. 

[ 201 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

But there was neither self-consciousness nor 
boldness about Etienne, — only confidence 
in his instinct. He was the aristocrat through 
and through now, without a trace of that 
concern-for-what-others-may-think that is 
the profoundest characteristic of the middle 
class, the sign at once of its importance and 
its pettiness, of the depth below which it 
cannot sink and the height above which 
it cannot rise. Etienne was looking at me 
trustfully. 

"Yes," I said simply, "I will be the 
ogre." 

His question had meant more to me than 
my reply could possibly mean to him. There 
are two things that touch the heart deeply, 
perhaps because they are so rare. The one 
is a woman's sudden spontaneous caress, the 
other the impulsive advances of an unspoiled 
child. In the emotion caused by neither 
does vanity play any part. 

So for half an hour, abandoning my dig- 
nity, I played at Ogre, with a fervor which 

[ 202 ] 



In My Court 

was all gratitude to Etienne, making fearful 
grimaces, testing tentatively the plumpness 
of my victims, or devouring them outright, 
while they shivered in excitement or uttered 
shrieks of delighted terror, — for they were 
soon won over, being but children after all, 
and having that sense of the dramatic against 
which no other instinct of the French heart 
can long hold out, — and roaring so horribly 
that the nurses forgot their knitting for ad- 
miration and the mothers rushed to the 
windows in fear. When the game was at its 
height Etienne ran swiftly from me. 

"5o« soir, papa,'' he cried; and glancing 
up I saw that Monsieur Dupont had entered 
the court, and was staring at us in surprise. 
He was just home, I judged, from the 
mairie, for he carried his black-leather port- 
folio under one arm. As for the travelers, 
prisoners, and knights of Charlemagne's 
court, they had stiffened suddenly into rigid 
little men and women who reminded me 
sadly of photographs in a family album. 
[ 203 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

Etienne had seized his father's hand. 
"We were playing Ogre, papa," he ex- 
plained. "Monsieur was the ogre." 

"Ah?" said Monsieur Dupont looking at 
me uncomprehendingly. 

Etienne drew his father forward, and still 
holding tight to him with one hand, held 
out the other to me. "Thank you, mon- 
sieur," he said gravely. "You were a splen- 
did ogre. Au revoir, monsieur.^* 

Monsieur Dupont raised his hat to me 
politely, but his face was still puzzled. The 
French bourgeois seldom plays with his 
children. He is fond of them, and far more 
prodigal of caresses than an American fa- 
ther, but he treats them always as though 
they were grown-up, and requires of them 
a solemn respect, that may not lessen their 
affection for him, but that destroys the pos- 
sibility of sympathy. They have no pleasant 
half-way stage, but leap at once from in- 
fancy to manhood. Even the games played 
in my court when Etienne was absent were, 
[ 204 ] 



In My Court 

unless they were mere irrepressible romping 
(and they were seldom that) prim and dig- 
nified games. The recognized wildness of 
the lad between eighteen and twenty-two 
when, the baccalaureat passed, and business 
or the university entered, he has become all 
at once his own master, — a wildness often 
resembling debauch, — is perhaps but a re- 
action from this philistinism into which he 
has been crushed, but a struggling forth of 
his own identity. In this city, where the 
old struggle between Paganism and Chris- 
tianity is forever going on, and where talent 
is strewn as thickly as the leaves in my court, 
it is matter for conjecture whether he will 
emerge completely, make of his reaction a 
philosophy, and leave behind him a great or 
a little name ; or whether, incapable of think- 
ing, or impeded by circumstances, he will 
return to the caste from which he sprang; 
whether he will be one of the class that 
makes France preeminent, or one of that 
which keeps France populous. In the first 
[ 205 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

case the reaction will be good, for it will 
have served toward achievement ; in the sec- 
ond harmful, for then it will have been a 
force making against his happiness in the life 
for which he is fitted. 

Two or three days later I went again into 
the court. The children greeted me cor- 
dially. 

"But where is Etienne .? " I asked, look- 
ing about me. 

" He is ill, monsieur," said one solemnly. 

" 111 ! " I exclaimed. " Not seriously ?" 

" Oh, yes, monsieur, very ill indeed. 
Would monsieur play at Ogre to-day ? '* 

" No," I said, " not to-day — another 
time " ; and left the court. It was nothing, 
doubtless, — to be ill is always in a child's 
mind to be very ill. Nevertheless I was wor- 
ried — for the ten or fifteen minutes one 
concedes to another's troubles. Then Sep- 
tember came and I went to the shore for 
two weeks, and forgot Etienne and the court 
in the joy of the crisp salt air and the sting- 
[ 206 ] 



In My Court 

ing spray of the breakers that beat upon the 
Norman coast. 

When, having driven home from the Gare 
Saint-Lazare through the sunny streets on 
my return one mid-September afternoon, 
I strode buoyantly into the court, I saw 
at once that something was wrong. The 
children stood about in groups whispering, 
and an atmosphere like that of an English 
Sunday seemed to envelop the whole enclo- 
sure. 

"^'est-ce qu'il y a, Marthe?'' I asked 
the little blonde girl. 

" EtiennCy monsieur ,' she replied, with, 
beneath the half-comprehending awe of her 
tone, a certain pride in being the first to 
break the news : " he died day before yester- 
day. The funeral has just been." 

You have known it all along; you have 
seen ahead from the beginning ; for to you 
it is only a story, — a too simple obvious 
story you must find it ; but to me, for whom 
it was truth, it was not obvious, and I would 
[ 207 J 



T'he Book of Paris 

think it sacrilege to make it over into some- 
thing more artistic, better constructed. 

I was lonely that evening, and went to 
the apartment of the little old man across 
the hall. He welcomed me courteously and 
gave me an arm-chair beside his before the 
open fire ; for the nights were already cool. 
I spoke to him of Etienne. 

" It is strange," I said, " that his death 
should make me unhappy, — a child of six 
whom I saw but a few times and played with 
once." 

" No," said the old man, " it is not strange. 
Every added capacity for pleasure is a ca- 
pacity for pain too. The same sensitiveness 
which led you at once to recognize the boy's 
charm makes you now feel pain at his death. 
It is nothing that Etienne was a child and 
that you saw him but a few times. What 
are our most poignant memories — a life- 
long friendship, a happy married life? No, 
but the intimacy of a two days' acquaintance- 
ship under odd conditions, some little trick 
[ 208 ] 



In My Court 

of manner in a woman who was never even 
our mistress, or the glance of inspired com- 
prehension exchanged with some one un- 
known and never seen again. But you should 
not grieve. For yourself you have added a 
delicate memory, and for Etienne it is surely 
better." 

" No," I cried rebelliously, " it is not bet- 
ter ! Life is wonderful ! " 

" Ah! " observed the old man sadly, "you 
are young." 

"Etienne was younger!" 

" There are two great blessings," he con- 
tinued, " youth and death. Youth is good," 
he said, his eyes brightening ; " I remember 
my own, though it is a half-century away 
now ; but death, I am sure, is better," he 
added wearily. 

Two days later, towards evening I de- 
scended again to the court and sat down on 
a bench in the quietest corner. After a time 
Monsieur Dupont entered, wheeling the 
bicycle that he sometimes uses on his trips 
[ 209 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

to and from the mairie. He passed close to 
me, — for the little shed under which he 
keeps the machine was not far from my 
seat; and I saw with sudden pity that his 
heavy face looked heavier and his little 
eyes dull and red. When he had put the 
bicycle away, he came back and stood look- 
ing about him apathetically. I raised my 
hat when he turned toward me, and he re- 
plied mechanically, then, after a moment's 
hesitation, sat down beside me and opened 
his newspaper slowly. But I understood that 
he was longing to speak to some one, and so 
closed my book and waited. He glanced at 
me two or three times to see if I were read- 
ing, then at last laid down his paper. 

" You have heard that my son is dead ? '* 
he said abruptly, in a tone that was less a 
question than a challenge and almost hostile 
with timidity. 

" Yes," I said, as gently as possible, " I 
know." 

I paused, searching for something to add 

[ 2IO ] 



In My Court 

and finding nothing. That mattered little, 
however. It was not the expression of an- 
other's sympathy that he craved, but an 
opportunity of speaking himself, of some- 
how escaping from the facts by putting 
them into words. And he was not one who 
could talk to himself: he must have a lis- 
tener. 

" I buried him the day before yesterday,'* 
he went on dully, as though repeating a 
lesson. " I buried my son. I shall never see 
him again. — I don't understand." 

It was pitiful to see this man, whom gen- 
eral ideas had always passed by, discovering 
now for himself the bitter meaning of the 
old, old formula. All his life, doubtless, he 
had said on occasion, with glib solemnity, 
that death was very inexplicable and sad, 
because that was the thing to say; now for 
the first time he felt the significance of the 
phrase. " I do not understand," he had said 
helplessly. The effort was too great. He 
fell back on facts. 

[ 211 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

" It was scarlet fever," he continued. 
"He suffered, monsieur." 

I winced. It has always seemed to me 
terrible for a child to suffer — not because, 
being innocent, he does not deserve to (suf- 
fering is as horrible in the sinner as in the 
saint) ; but because he has nothing to help 
him through. He is too young to have 
either a God in whom he can trust or one 
whom he can revile; either a sustaining 
confidence in a great wise scheme of which 
he is part or the contemptuous courage born 
of disbelief in the existence of any scheme : 
he can only feel pain and cry out. And 
Etienne had been so delicate and sensitive 
a child ! 

After a moment the man spoke again. 
" What had he done to suffer so ?" he cried. 
" You saw him playing here. You talked 
with him. You know whether he was good 
or not, — he was always like that, mon- 
sieur. What had he done? Bon Dieu! What 
had he done ? " he repeated fiercely. 

[ 212 ] 



In My Court 

What indeed! And what reply could I 
make to this question that has been asked 
since the beginning of the world — and 
never answered ? 

" You must not think of that," I said 
hurriedly. " That is all done with." (How 
in our impotence of mind we catch at 
stock -phrases!) "There is no suffering 
where your son is now — only happi- 
ness." 

My hypocrisy sickened me ; but the fact 
that I clung to it nevertheless brought me 
a sudden flash of tolerance for the point of 
view of the priest. Time and again I had 
heard these same platitudes spoken from the 
pulpit or at funerals, and had despised the 
clergymen who uttered them for the insin- 
cerity in their sanctimonious voices, for the 
attitude of faith in which faith was wanting 
(it was not, doubtless, that they disbelieved 
them, at least not always ; only that they did 
not feel them at the moment) ; but now I 
understood that they knew these formulas to 
[ 213 ] 



The Book of Paris 

be healing and, irrespective of their truth 
or untruth, best to be believed. 

Monsieur Dupont looked at me dubious- 
ly. "Do you think," he asked, "that I 
shall see my son again ?" 

" I am sure of it," I answered firmly. 

Who is there that has the right to speak 
the truth if the truth will only give needless 
pain ? I was glad I had lied ; for the father's 
heavy face softened and his eyes grew less 
dull. 

" You think so, really ?" he asked again, 
not because he doubted me, but for the 
comfort of hearing the assertion repeated. 

"Yes," I replied once more. 

He sat silent for a few minutes, looking 
away with a half smile on his lips. By tell- 
ing this man that I thought one way I had 
somehow — temporarily at least — eased his 
pain ; if I had told him I thought another 
way I should have made him wretched ; and 
all the time what I thought or did not think 
mattered as little to the truth itself as the 
[ 214 ] 



In My Court 

brown leaves that were already beginning to 
fall sparsely mattered to the wind that sent 
them rustling downward. The irony of it 
was appalling. 

The light had faded. There was no one 
left in the court but us. Monsieur Dupont 
turned to me suddenly. " I am keeping you. 
See, it is late," he said, taking out his watch, 
"and you have not dined." 

We rose. He looked at me in a troubled 
silence for some seconds, groping dumbly for 
the right words with which to leave me. He 
lived on habits ; it was they that would over- 
come his suffering. For each situation he 
would have, I thought, a fitting phrase. But 
the present case was unique and unprepared 
for; there was no phrase that solved it. 

" I thank you," he stammered at last, hold- 
ing out his hand. " You have been very kind. 
Good-night, monsieur." 

That was a month ago. The children have 
forgotten now, and Monsieur Dupont has be- 

[215 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

come again, so far as one can see, the placid 
bourgeois he was before. I thought to-day a 
trifle bitterly, when I heard his boisterous 
laugh, only a little modulated by the con- 
sciousness of his mourning, that Etienne was 
no longer a memory for him, only the mem- 
ory of a memory. But to think so was ar- 
rogant and unfair. Who can tell in how 
many delicate ways the influence of his child 
creeps through the man's existence? 

For myself it is hard to explain what is 
left. I do not think of Etienne often, — how 
should I in a world which is rich and exult- 
ant with vitality ? Yet I feel that somehow, 
where his brief life touched mine, something 
was added for me to the store of significant 
experiences that one puts away and that be- 
come the background of one's mind. 



St. Etienne du Mont 



Pere Lachaise 










\^ 






VIII 




Phe Lachaise. — jin 
Impression 

N minds courageous enough to 
embrace it, the thought of death 
is always a conscious presence ; 
but they, it has been well said, 
are the noble minds, and I know that I am 
not among them. I am not more serious than 
most men ; for, once past the black period of 
impotent dejection succeeding the day when 
it first flashed upon me, as it has flashed 
upon so many thousand others, that perhaps 
in all this seething, struggling, swarming ex- 
istence, there was no plan, no idea, nothing, 
— only hopeless confusion, — I came slowly 
to feel, with a lassitude to which braver men 
do not surrender, that the one way to face 
[ 219 ] 



The Book of Paris 

the chaos, and preserve a measure of tran- 
quilUty, was to refuse to take it seriously as a 
whole ; that the kindest way of considering 
life — since, it seemed, one must consider it 
somehow — was as a joke. And so I laugh at 
it all, — when I can, — and at myself more 
than the rest of it. It is not hard to laugh ; 
for the drearier and more pointless life ap- 
pears regarded as a play with a beginning, an 
end, and a moral, the more inimitable it be- 
comes as a farce. Only, beneath the amuse- 
ment in the observation of these pygmies 
playing at being heroes, myself as hard as 
any of the others, I am dimly aware of a 
something else that I do not care to face. 
Nearly always it lurks motionless at the bot- 
tom of my mind; but on certain days it 
comes, unbidden, out of its hiding, to settle 
down like a black shadow on everything, 
obliterating the farce, and leaving me con- 
scious only of itself, and of what it is — the 
thought of death. 

Yesterday was such a day. I awoke to the 

[ 220 ] 



Pere Lachaise 

gray November morning with a sense of un- 
utterable desolation. All that there was of 
buoyant and hopeful in me seemed to have 
been extinguished, and I felt myself wrapped 
about with a moral depression that was like 
the pale mist enveloping the bare leafless elms 
in the little court on which my bedroom win- 
dow looks. Through the morning I fought 
the sensation, struggling not to think, but in 
the afternoon, exhausted, I gave up, and went 
out into the solitude of the crowded streets. 
At such times there is no reality in externals ; 
although I can recall every one of the black 
fancies — silly fancies they seem to-day — 
that beset me as I walked, I cannot remem- 
ber how and by what detours I reached the 
Place de la Bastille. But in that blank square, 
about which cling more recollections than 
about any other spot in Paris, I paused ; and, 
slowly, before the emptiness of its present and 
the majestic memories of its past, conflicting 
heterogeneous notions stole out of my mind 
and the vague depression that weighed down 

[ 221 ] 



TA- Book of Piuis 

upon mc rcsoU c\l itsclt into the one great 
thought. It nuist always he a terrihle tlioiiirht 
tor those who have not taith that death is 
only a transition ; hut there is in tlie very 
liraniatie completeness ot it a kind ot grim 
vsatistaetion tor the ieonoelast, akin to that 
one derives Ironi a tragedy. 

From the riace de la Hastillc to the cem- 
etery of Pere Laehaise leads the rue de la 
Roquette, and into it after a ie\y minutes I 
turned, suhmissivelv it seemed to me, so pos- 
sessed is one at times with the fatuous illu- 
sion that he is the tool ot some unknown 
force. As I did so, a long tuneral procession 
curved in trom the other side of the square; 
ai\d while the hearse, with its hlack swaying 
pinnies and the rigid, expressionless driver, 
crept hy, every man on the crowded side- 
walks hared his head. There is in Latin 
countries a certain reverence hefore the pre- 
sence oi death that is nowhere more pro- 
found than in pagan France. In Spain and 
Italy, too, men raise their hats at the passage 
[ ^-- ] 



Small Shops, Rue de Rennes 



^,vkm 







Hjn^^b< 



P^re Lachaise 

of the hearse, but there seems to me to be 
a deeper feeling about the act in France 
than elsewhere. Imagination, perhaps, yet 
I think not ; for the more one learns to doubt 
the conclusions of his reason, the more one 
grows to trust the truth of these swift, ephe- 
meral impressions. Little forms are often the 
symbols of great ideas; it is so, whether 
clearly understood or not, with this simple 
ceremonial in France ; for what is so nobly 
significant of the essential equality of men, 
that lies beneath their differences, as this 
universal salutation of Death, the one com- 
mon master of us all? 

Where it leaves the Place de la Bastille, 
the rue de la Roquette is a busy jostling 
street; but little by little, as it proceeds on 
its way, its aspect changes. It should be 
called the rue du Cimetiere, for surely no 
other street ever advanced with so unmis- 
takable an indication of its goal. Following 
it, one grows conscious that the crowd is 
first slowly thinning, then becoming sparse. 
[ 223 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

In the long even lines of architecture to 
right and left great gaps appear, through 
which one gazes at the blank windowless 
back walls of apartment houses surrounding 
the space not built up ; and the gay shows in 
the little shop-windows change to displays 
of uncut tomb-stones, artificial flowers, and 
mortuary wreaths. There are no rattling 
wagons on the cobble-stones; a silence has 
settled upon the street. So that finally, when 
one lifts his eyes, and sees the gray wall of 
Pere Lachaise ahead of him, the sight seems 
as logical as the denoument of a book. The 
rue de la Roquette might be the emblem of 
a life. 

Entering the cemetery by the great gate, 
I was conscious of no change. The silence 
here was not profounder than that which 
hung over the street I had just left. Only 
there the two sides of the thoroughfare were 
flanked each with an interminable wall of 
masonry that formed one vast dwelling, stop- 
ping short now and then at the edge of a 
[ 224 ] 



Pire Lachaise 

yawning unused patch of ground, to begin 
again, always the same, at the other; while 
here the avenue was lined with a multitude 
of tiny stone constructions, like shrunken 
houses, none more than three or four feet 
wide, and crowding close upon one another, 
yet each built, separate and complete by it- 
self, in a pitiful attempt to claim a remnant 
of individuality for some indistinguishable 
bit of the dust that fills the ground beneath 
them all. The rue de la Roquette was life 
resembling death; this was death striving 
for the appearance of life. 

To the left of the avenue, and only a little 
way from the Porte Principale, is the grave 
of de Musset. It is marked by a stone on 
which are carved the lines from "Lu- 
cie":— 

** Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai 
Pl?,ntez un saule au cimetiere. 
J'aime son feuillage eplore. 
La paleur m'en est douce et chere, 
Et son ombre sera legere 
A la terre ou je dormirai"; 

[ 225 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

and over it obediently droops a very small 
and sickly willow. I never enter Pere La- 
chaise without stopping to read the verses 
quoted, nor without satisfying myself that 
the willow is still as unimpressive as ever. 
No one doubts the importance of de Mus- 
set's rank in literature; his prose is unsur- 
passed, and one must be callous indeed not 
to feel the lyric charm of his verse ; but, so 
much granted, he remains only the finest 
and most delicate of sentimentalists. He was 
of the age of Lamartine, when poets rediscov- 
ered how pleasant it was to weep ; and in all 
his serious verse the note of sincerity is never 
once touched. To assert that " Les Nuits '* 
were born of the unhappiness de Musset's 
rupture with George Sand caused him, is an 
absurdity ; they were born of his artistic con- 
ception of his unhappiness. The distinction, 
however, is too subtle not to appear sophis- 
tical. " Les Nuits " were de Musset's best 
expression of his life, and his life was so 
good a pose that it convinced even himself. 
[ 226 ] 



Pire Lachaise 

After that, to say that it convinced the world 
is an anti-climax ; for the world, on the per- 
petual look-out for melodrama, is only too 
eager to be deceived; its delight in being 
given what it craves makes its critical judg- 
ment at the time impossible. We have all 
been corrupted by the artistic principle. We 
are not much interested in existence as it is, 
— incoherent, unbegun, and unfinished; we 
want it made over into something logical 
and complete that we call romance. We are 
pleased to be told of a life which appears the 
working out of a theme, particularly a tragic 
one. Consistent grief, ending in death, espe- 
cially appeals to us. But Nature has merci- 
fully ordained that a consistent grief shall 
be impossible. No one can for a great while 
love — except very calmly and sweetly — a 
person who is no longer by his side. If a 
lover is to kill himself in despair at his mis- 
tress's death, he must do so immediately ; 
for the despair will soon be gone. There is 
more forgetting than remembering in life. 
[ 227 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

We will not, though, recognize the kind- 
ness of such a law, except sometimes theo- 
retically, as I am recognizing it now ; but 
continue always in our search for romance, 
indifferent to the fact that wherever romance 
is found it exists either as an accident, — 
only a seeming agreement with our drama- 
tic principle, — or as a pose. In de Musset's 
case the pose was perfect and admirably sus- 
tained ; the laws of romance were satisfied. 
Hence his great popularity and that of the 
four exquisitely worded poems which best 
represent him. They were written nearly a 
century ago, but their appeal is still great, and 
will be, as long as the craving for romance 
exists. To attempt to make any point by 
an attack on their sincerity would be fruit- 
less; if lines from " Les Nuits " had been 
carved on de Musset's tomb, I should never 
have tried to express the feeling it aroused 
in me. 

It is, however, from another very dif- 
ferent poem that the verses used have been 
[ 228 ] 



Pire Lachaise 

chosen. The mood of " La Nuit de Mai " 
is elusive, wistful, and strangely enchanted, 
but " Lucie " is only a luxurious delighted 
riot of sadness. Every one knows the poem : 
A boy and a girl, each fifteen years old, sit 
dreaming one night at a harpsichord beside 
an open window, through which drift moon- 
light and the perfume of spring flowers. 
They are silent. The boy's hand brushes the 
girl's; she starts from her reverie, touches 
the keys, and sings. She stops, weeping, rests 
her head against his shoulder, and they kiss. 
But she is very sad, perhaps with a premoni- 
tion of her fate ; for two months later she is 
dead. 

It is hard not to retain a little affection 
for " Lucie," especially if one became ac- 
quainted with it very young ; but surely no 
grown man in his sober senses would main- 
tain that this elegie is an expression of sin- 
cere grief. Grief hurts — to express and to 
be told about; but whatever tears de Musset 
shed in composing " Lucie " (and I do not 
[ 229 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

doubt that they were many) must have given 
him untold pleasure. 

The poem begins, to state the mood, and 
concludes, to emphasize it, with the six lines 
now engraved on de Musset's tomb. Let me 
quote them again : — 

•* Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai, 
Plantez un saule au cimetiere. 
J'aime son feuillage eplore. 
La paleur m'en est douce et chere, 
Et son ombre sera legere 
A la terre ou je dormirai." 

Rereading these lines yesterday, in the ceme- 
tery of Pere Lachaise, I thought suddenly 
and irreverently of a stanza in a song that 
some years ago used to be sung in America 
among boys and girls on pleasure parties, 
whenever gayety was high. It runs as fol- 
lows: — 

"Oh, dig my grave both wide and deep. 
Place tomb-stones at my head and feet. 
And on my breast a turtle-dove. 
To show the world I died of love." 

Written down in black and white, as they 
now are, these four lines appear so much 

[ 230 ] 



Pire Lachaise 

more atrocious than they ever sounded — 
though heaven knows they sounded bad 
enough — that I am shocked at their having 
seemed in any sense analogous to the quota- 
tion from " Lucie." And yet my judgment, 
struggling out of the anguish caused by those 
barbarous rhymes, still insists that they are. 
Although de Musset's lines are exquisite 
verse, the mere sound of which is delicious, 
and these the most abject doggerel, the sen- 
timent of both stanzas is the same, no falser 
in the one than in the other. But death is a 
very grim and tragic reality, and so for men 
to have accepted the pretty mawkishness of 
"Lucie" as genuine feeling, to have taken 
de Musset at his word, and to have planted 
an actual willow above his grave, is a bit of 
the grossest vulgarity, that shocks one in the 
same way it would shock him to hear a Tosti 
song in a Gothic cathedral. To-day, when 
the willow is absurdly puny and unimpress- 
ive, it is the puerility of the whole proceed- 
ing that most occupies one ; but before many 
[ 231 ] 



The Book of Paris 

years the tree will have become large enough 
to be convincing, and then one will feel only- 
anger at the sacrilege. 

De Musset's grave, however, is the first 
and last in Pere Lachaise before which one 
can experience anything even so distantly 
akin to humor as the irony roused by this 
sentimentality accepted as sentiment ; for 
across the end of the Avenue Principale and 
directly in one's path as one advances rises 
Bartholome's Monument to the Dead. 

There is nothing comic about the fool 
in "Lear." With his acrid reflections he is 
a kind of Greek chorus, each of his jests a 
harping on the bitter theme that is driving 
the old king to madness. But a time comes 
when the tragedy has grown too profound to 
admit of even the semblance of mirth, and 
the fool disappears, to be heard of no more. 
Some similar effacement takes place in the 
mind of a man sensitive to impressions, 
when he visits Fere Lachaise. As one gazes 
at the Monument to the Dead all incidental 
[ 232 ] 



Pere Lachaise 

thoughts, however relevant, become im- 
possible, and one is conscious only of the 
mystery and the grandeur and the terrible 
inevitability of death. The simplicity and 
symmetry of the work are overwhelming. 
These two nude central figures standing in 
the door of a tomb, their backs to us, the 
woman with her arm stretched out, her hand 
resting on the man's shoulder, state the 
mood of the whole conception as unmistak- 
ably as the first great sweeping chord states 
the tonality of a movement in a symphony. 
They are looking inward; the sculptor has 
not needed to reveal their faces to express 
the awe and the fear and the wonder that 
they feel at the gate of the unknown. These 
two stand in repose; but without, on a nar- 
row ledge which traverses the tomb at about 
a third of its height, there approach from 
either side, in two lines of splendidly com- 
posed disorder, others, in postures of grief, 
of despair, of abandon, of terror, — none 
with hope. It may be that the artist thought 
[ 233 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

of these simply as mourners, but I prefer to 
believe that he meant them as those who 
must follow the first two through the door ; 
and so, in imagination, one sees the two lines, 
continued here to the edges of the tomb, 
stretching on without end, inexhaustibly, 
and composed not of marble images but of 
living men and women, — of thousands, of 
millions, of all humanity, each with his 
place in the line, but none knowing surely 
where it may be, until he sees suddenly the 
black door before him. 

Below the ledge in an embrasure some- 
what wider than the door above, but not so 
high, is a group of four, — a man and a 
woman, dead, lying rigid side by side, their 
heads slightly turned toward each other and 
the four hands clasped together, across their 
thighs the body of a child, face down, 
swathed but for a protruding foot and a tiny 
relaxed hand ; and on a step above the three 
a half-kneeling woman's figure, nude ex- 
cept for a veil that floats delicately behind 
[ 234 ] 



P^re Lachaise 

her and falls softly over one knee. Her 
arms are outstretched, and she gazes down 
at the dead below. On the wall beneath her 
left arm are inscribed the words : " Sur ceux 
qui habit aient k pays de V ombre de la mort une 
lumiere resplendit" ; but I think the sculp- 
tor's purpose was artistic rather than sym- 
bolic here. The contrast between the almost 
painful realism in the emaciated bodies 
of the corpses and the idealism of the gra- 
cious exquisitely poised creature above is 
glorious. 

If I have found much meaning in this 
monument, it is not that I imagine its merit 
to consist in its intellectual significance. Its 
true greatness lies, of course, in its splendid 
unity of composition, its dignity of design, 
its beautiful handling of the nude, and in 
the architectural simplicity of the whole, 
— of which things, vital and all-important 
as they are in sculpture, it is difficult to 
write and still more difficult to read. Nor 
is it that I am accustomed to consider more 
[ 235 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

than casually the symbolism of a work of 
art. I feel, as much as another, distrust for 
the picture or the statue that tells a story. 
A story is better told in literature, where 
sequence of time can be expressed. Paint- 
ing and sculpture, higher forms of art, ap- 
peal to the emotions of the man iusthetically 
cultivated directly without the intervention 
of thought. The subtle laws governing them 
are not the sterile forms the Philistine thinks 
them, but the hypnotic passes by which 
somehow the artist is enabled to transfer 
his mood to the mind oi another. They 
were discovered, not invented. The render- 
ing in a picture or a statue ot a thought 
capable of any save a very vague expression 
in words is a dangerous thino- too often but 
a disguise for the absence of a higher beauty 
in the work. Obviously, though, symbolism 
is to some extent inevitable. Complete de- 
tachment from the concrete is not possi- 
ble, — even in music. Sculptors may chisel 
out of stone forms so perfect that they seem 
[ n^^ ] 



Pire Ijachaise 

to us, standing before them, to be expres- 
sions of abstract beauty with nothing of the 
man or woman left in them ; but they are 
none the less interpretations of the human 
body ; and painters do not cover their can- 
vases simply with harmonious arrangements 
of colors. Just how far the su!)ject rightly 
enters into the value of a work of art, it is 
hard to determine; but perhaps it may be an 
approximation of the truth to say that when 
the thoughts set astir by the thing presented 
reinforce the emotions primarily aroused by 
the manner of presentation, the subject has 
served its purpose. 

This rare adjustment has seldom been 
more nicely attained than in Bartholomews 
Monument to the Dead. At first sir^ht of 
it, without as yet a thought of what it sym- 
bolizes, — without any thought at all, — 
one apprehends the spirit of the work in an 
emotion impossible of translation into words, 
yet as vivid and poignant as those of hate 
or love. Afterward, when this has faded, as 

r 237 ] 



The Book of Paris 

it must very soon fade, — moments of unal- 
loyed feeling are brief, — one becomes 
aware of the symbolism in these massed 
figures and this black portal ; and by the 
thoughts so set moving in his mind one 
conjures up the ghost of that first sharp 
emotion. For they are thoughts about feel- 
ings, — about the majesty, the inevitability, 
the cruelty, and the beauty of death ; and 
although the initial emotion was subtler 
and stronger than any of these, it had yet 
something in common with each. Symbol- 
ism here has served a high purpose. I know 
of no monument to the dead nobler than 
this of Bartholome's, save the tombs of the 
Medici in Florence. 

The efl^ect of the monument on the be- 
holder, when he turns at last from it, is to 
leave him with a sense of only the great 
fact of death. The irony or the dignity, 
the sadness or the significance, which, ac- 
cording to his character, he is accustomed 
to find in the thought of it, he can, while 
[238] 



Pire Lachaise 

the spell lasts, no longer feel ; for these 
are aspects depending for existence on his 
own personal judgment, and for the time 
being his personal judgment is suspended, 
as something distinguishing him from other 
men. Whatever he may individually have 
thought about death gives way temporarily 
before his consciousness of it as a universal 
fact. 

It must have been by the Avenue du 
Puits that I left the Avenue Principale yes- 
terday when I had withdrawn my eyes 
from the monument ; for I recall passing the 
chapel of the Rothschilds and not far from 
it the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. I could 
feel nothing incongruous in such a proxim- 
ity, though I remember I thought it strange 
I could not. Jewish bankers of to-day and 
priestly lovers of centuries ago, — only dif- 
ferent stories, written, it may be, by the 
same writer, holding each a certain ephem- 
eral existence while one reads, none after- 
wards. The book remains when the reader 
[ 239 ] 



The Book of Paris 

has laid it down, — words, — for one story 
as for another. 

I do not know how long I wandered in 
the cemetery, but I followed many roads 
and stopped before many graves. Chopin, 
Larochefoucauld, Raspail, Ney, Daubigny, 
Casimir-Perier, — I said the names over to 
myself dully, but they stood for nothing 
here. Familiar characters all of them in the 
vague unconvincing novel we call Life; 
strangely futile, meaningless, and out-of- 
place in the midst of this eternal reality. It 
was as though some one had said to me: 
"Let me present Hamlet," or "Henry Es- 
mond." The names I have enumerated, and 
others like them, were carved on stones a 
little apart from the rest, but such pauses 
were brief; inevitably after each would begin 
again the long line of shrunken houses ; and 
it was in the monotonous uniformity of these 
that I saw the truth indeed symbolized. I 
remember stopping once — in what part of 
the cemetery I forget — by the monument 
[ 240 ] 



Pere Lachaise 

of a young English lord dead a hundred 
years ago, and being touched on reading the 
inscription, with its long list of family titles. 
Pathetic useless pomposity ! A few feet of 
turf on either side, and the interminable 
array of tiny mortuary houses was resumed. 
Their persistence began to appall me. "How 
close those beneath must sleep ! how close ! " 
I thought; and I found myself lingering 
in a kind of relief before the isolated 
tombs. Reality is harder to face than fic- 
tion. 

In the end, following the long course of 
the Avenue des Acacias, with its leafless trees 
that would be so full of blossom in the spring, 
and taking the second Avenue Transversale, 
I left the cemetery by a side gate, and stood 
for a moment just outside, looking across 
the city from the little adjacent hill that is 
used as a park. A long way off, on the 
heights of Montmartre, the great dome of 
the Sacre Cceur rose, a pale shadow through 
the mist. A fair promise for the man with 
[ 241 ] 



The Book of Paris 

faith in a noble plan beneath all things, the 
vision of the white church seen from the 
cemetery gates; but faith is a rare gift, and to 
me the dome that hung so beautifully in the 
air symbolized only a glorious myth, the 
loveliest of the fairy castles we have built to 
console ourselves. 

The cold November twilight was falling 
as I descended into the city. The mist still 
hung over Paris, but fainter, with a pale new 
moon struggling through it. The boule- 
vards were brilliant with lights, and filled 
with a throng that ebbed and flowed slowly 
along the sidewalks and curved here and 
there in black spirals through the press of 
carriages in the streets. Whips cracked im- 
patiently, horses' hoofs beat rhythmically on 
the pavement, and the vendors of evening 
papers cried their journals harshly; but, as 
I looked down from the imperiale of my om- 
nibus, it seemed to me that in this noisy 
confusion there was only the semblance 
of substantiality; reality was in the silence 
[ 242 ] 



On Boulevard Montparnasse 



.w 



<>^llv- 




.&5'JL£Jf^^^ <'n- ^f^siv^-.r 






nfn 



Pire Lachaise 

of the secluded place I had left. And the 
figures swarming here in the thoroughfare 
beneath me were less crowded than those 
motionless ones which lay beneath the 
ground of Pere Lachaise. 

What should it have mattered to me how 
close the dead slept? It mattered little to 
them. Why should that thought have re- 
mained the most vivid among those of the 
day? Yet all through the evening, as I sat 
before my fire, it haunted me, when the rest 
had grown dull. The mist was quite gone 
now; from my window I could see the 
moonlight rippling along the river, and I fell 
to imagining with what strange tracery, 
creeping through the bare boughs of the 
oaks and the acacias, it must cover the white 
tombs and the long rows of mortuary cha- 
pels in the cemetery, now that the great 
gates were closed, and there was no foot-fall 
to disturb the crowded silence. The vision 
was so vivid that I tried at last to put it into 
words, choosing verse, that I might make 
[ 243 ] 



The Book of Paris 

of the first fancy the refrain it had become 
in my own mind. 

How close the dead sleep in this silent place! 

Piercing the gloom 

Of guardian oaks, the moonbeams drift and trace 

Strange shifting characters across the face 

Of tomb on tomb 

Innumerable; beneath there is no space 

Unfilled, so close the dead sleep in this place ! 

Above them bloom 

Pale flowers. Why should we grant them other grace ? 

Friends, aliens, foes, — they are now but one race. 

Who need no room. 

How close the dead sleep in this silent place! 



On the Boulevard 



An Interview 



^«^'/ 




jy^ -i x>- * * 



4f;f 5r 







IX 

An Interview 




if|iT was a November evening. 

Outside, the rain was sweeping 
^j^ in gusts against the windows ; 

but indoors, with the curtains 
drawn and a fire burning on the hearth, my 
little sitting-room was warm and cheerful. 
I had spread my papers out on the table 
before the lamp and put a new pen in the 
holder ; but as I rose to light what I swore 
should be my last cigarette before going to 
work, one of the tiny logs in the fireplace 
collapsed with a shower of sparks. A sud- 
den blaze followed, that illumined the whole 
room and shone especially on the green, gold- 
lettered back of a volume in one of the 
shelves opposite. I stepped across and took 
it down. It was " Le Mannequin d'Osier '* 
[ 247 ] 



T^he Book of Paris 

of Anatole France, the book that I love the 
best in contemporary literature. I carried it 
over to my place by the fire, and opened 
it, with that sweet sense of doing something 
a little wrong, to a favorite passage, intending 
to read only a few lines. But once under the 
spell of its incisive gem-like French, and 
the searching irony of its philosophy, I could 
not lay the book aside, but read on and on, 
turning the leaves in spite of myself, resolv- 
ing as I began each new chapter that when 
it was finished I would stop, and each time 
breaking the resolution,until finally I reached 
the last word of the last page, and closed the 
covers with a sigh. Then I glanced at my 
watch ; it was one o'clock. Too late to do 
any work now, and there was no good in 
regretting ; so I put my papers away, and 
sitting back with "Le Mannequin d'Osier" 
still in my hand, fell to reflecting on it, and 
wondering about its author. 

It is strange how few among the great 
men of the past one wishes he might have 
[ 248 ] 



Little Balconies 



An Interview 

known personally. I should like to have met 
Shakespeare and Mozart and Moliere, it is 
true, and I would give all I possess to have 
been the humblest of Shelley's friends. But, 
as for most of the others, I am content with 
what they have left me of themselves. To- 
ward authors of our own day, however, our 
feelings are necessarily different. We are in 
sympathy with their point of view. Their 
ideas are ours, only completer, more logically 
developed and better expressed. Their faults 
especially, which we possess in a greater de- 
gree, endear them to us. Thus it frequently 
happens that in reading a contemporary au- 
thor we feel him to represent what is best 
and most worth-while in us ; we are con- 
scious of a desire, that is almost introspec- 
tive, to meet this higher self face to face. 
So it was with me, as I sat looking into the 
fire, and fingering abstractedly the familiar 
pages of the book I had j ust re-read. I ran over 
in my mind all the scattering information I 
had been able to gather concerning Anatole 
[ 249 ] 



l^he Book of Pans 

France — or Monsieur Thibaut, if you pre- 
fer his real name. He lived, some one had 
said, in a very small and closed society, and 
when he entered a salon every one was sud- 
denly silent as at the entrance of a king. 
What means were there for an obscure for- 
eigner to meet this genius, acquaintance with 
whom had become so rare and precious a 
thing for his own countrymen ? I might 
write to him, but my letter would be only 
one of perhaps fifty. It had doubtless been 
many years since he had been able to feel 
anything but weariness in glancing over these 
monotonous outbursts of anonymous praise. 
Perhaps he no longer read them, but em- 
ployed a secretary just to throw them into 
the fire. Nevertheless the idea tempted me. 
There could be no harm in writing, and I 
did not need to send the letter. I drew up 
close to the table and began. 

It proved a difficult undertaking. All the 
thoughts awakened by the abbe Guitrel, the 
prefet Worms-Clavelin and the observations 
[ 250 ] 



An Interview 

of Monsieur Bergeret, — thoughts that touch 
on nearly every subject under the sun, as 
you will know if you have read the book, 
— clamored to be expressed, and to go 
trailing page-long parentheses behind them. 
But this would not do. The language of a 
letter fit for the greatest modern master 
of French to read must be concise and 
straightforward. I ended by suppressing the 
thoughts. When I had finished and was 
considering the scanty result, I reflected 
that to have spent the evening in work 
would have been less laborious. But here 
is what I had written : 

Monsieur : — It is only because, having just re-read 
''Le Mannequin d'Osier " for the fourth time, I feel it 
would be ungrateful not to try to express something of 
the humble admiration I have for the creator of Mon- 
sieur Bergeret, that I venture to write to you. When I 
read "Le Livre de Mon Ami" and "Le Crime de Syl- 
vestre Bonnard " I had self-restraint enough to repress 
the impulse I felt to tell you of the delicate pleasure they 
gave me; but with your " Histoire Contemporaine" it 
is different. Those four volumes have done more than 
[251 ] 



The Book of Paris 

afford me keen enjoyment : they have made me think 
thoughts I should never have discovered by myself. Their 
point of view has helped to form my own. For the sec- 
ond one of the series I have a greater admiration than 
for any other prose work of the last twenty years. It 
would be useless to write you what I think of the book ; 
if this were an intellectual letter it would be imperti- 
nent. Only permit me to say, monsieur, that we trans- 
atlantiques as well as your own countrymen appreciate 
the wholesome irony, the profound philosophy, the in- 
terest in humanity as it is, and the perfect art, of " Le 
Mannequin d'Osier." 

It would have shown, I know, a truer gratitude on 
my part to have spared you this expression of enthusi- 
asm, but I could not help myself. Before a splendid 
spectacle in nature one invariably utters a cry. The 
spectacle is not improved or in anywise changed, but the 
cry is irrepressible ; it is uttered for oneself. Thus this 
letter is written really for myself. If you should take it 
in any other way, I should fear that you thought me a 
seeker of autographs. 

Croyez^ monsieur^ etc. 

Here followed my name (written very legi- 
bly) ; I did not add the address (it was printed 
on the paper). 

I laid the pen on the table, and pushed 

[ 252 ] 



In the ^artier du Pantheon 



An Interview 

back my chair, then leaned over to throw- 
more wood on the embers that were grow- 
ing gray. In the morning I would send the 
letter. 

Time passes as though one were only 
looking into the fire ; events are scarcely 
more real than dreams. Could it be that 
the month had changed to December and 
the rain to snow, when one morning Euge- 
nie brought me, together with two wed- 
ding announcements from America (for five 
years my friends seem to have had nothing 
to do but marry), an envelope addressed 
in an unfamiliar hand and stamped with 
the Paris postmark ? I shall never feel any- 
thing sweeter nor more improbably perfect 
than my joy at the contents. They were 
simple, only a few lines on a sheet of thin 
paper : — 

Villa Said, December tenth. 
Monsieur : — Permit me to thank you for your flat- 
tering letter, and to express the hope that if you have 
no other engagement for Wednesday the fifteenth of 

[ 253 ] 



The Book of Paris 

December, you will be kind enough to call on me that 
afternoon between four and five o'clock. 

Be assured, monsieur, that I do not think you a 
"seeker of autographs," et croyez etc. 

Anatole Thibaut (Anatole France). 

If I had no other engagement ! I would 
have canceled anything, — even an appoint- 
ment to take tea with Madame Steinheil ! 

Looked back upon, one's life is a series 
of disconnected scenes — islands floating in 
a sea of forgetfulness. There is nothing 
to prove to me that the days between that 
on which I received the letter and the 
Wednesday following existed; if they did, 
they must have been a period of impatient 
dullness. But the afternoon of the rendez- 
vous is as distinct as yesterday in my mem- 
ory, beginning with the moment when the 
servant led me from the door of the house 
through a half-seen hallway to another door, 
the heavy hangings of which he held aside 
while I crossed the threshold, then let fall 
behind me. As I entered the room beyond, 
[ 254 ] 



An Interview 

which I rather felt than saw to be a study, a 
man rose from an arm-chair beside an Empire 
table, and advanced to meet me. I was face 
to face with Anatole France. 

My first impression, if I am to be honest, 
was not that he had wonderful eyes, nor yet 
that he was below medium height and was 
rather stout (though it might have been any 
of these), but a banal surprise that he should 
so strikingly resemble the portrait of him 
that I had seen at the Salon the preceding 
summer. It was less as though his likeness 
to it were remarkable (this, I suppose because 
I had seen the picture first, was the perverse 
way I found myself putting the thought), 
than as though he actually were the portrait. 

" You are very welcome, monsieur," he 
said, in a French so exquisitely enunciated 
that the rasping quality of the voice itself 
was at once forgotten. "Pray be seated. Will 
you smoke ? " Then, when he had lighted the 
cigarette he had proffered me and his own, 
he sank into a chair opposite mine and rested 
[ 255 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

his chin in his hand. " You are even younger 
than I thought," he observed at last without 
appearing to look at me. 

" You knew I was young ? " 

" Yes/' he remarked, but in the tone 
in which he might have admitted that this 
was a large city, or that we had been hav- 
ing cold weather. "You imagined that I 
had come to find letters of appreciation tire- 
some." 

"You have not?" 

"No," said Anatole France, "I still read 
them. Authors always do. I no longer get 
any pleasure from them, except" — cour- 
teously — "such as yours; but were they to 
cease suddenly, I should feel discontented and 
abused." 

One end of his upper lip curled down into 
a cynical little wrinkle. He was like his own 
Monsieur Bergeret now, — and yet not like 
him either, less human somehow. I knew 
Monsieur Bergeret personally ; I felt that I 
should never know his creator. I could not 
[ 256] 



An Interview 

rid myself of the idea that he was just the 
portrait I had seen in the Salon. 

"At all epochs," he continued, "the mind 
has been popularly considered as subject to 
none, or to strange and incomprehensible 
laws, essentially different from those simple 
ones that govern the body. The murmurs 
of philosophy whose persistent tendency has 
been to prove the contrary, have never 
reached the ear of the masses ; and indeed, 
had they done so, it is matter of doubt 
whether the masses would willingly have 
listened, for these popular misconceptions 
are obstinate and tenacious ; it is through 
them that superstition and the belief in the 
miraculous maintain themselves. Philoso- 
phers welcome each reduction of complexity 
to simplicity as a new step toward the ulti- 
mate comprehension of the universe, which 
is their dream ; but the masses, cherishing 
the belief that certain things cannot be un- 
derstood, look upon each such reduction with 
disapproval. Columbus was derided, and it 
[ 257 ] 



The Book of Paris 

is given to few to be as unpopular as Gali- 
leo." 

I nodded approval. An immense pride 
was swelling in my heart. For I too had 
thought this out. The master whom I re- 
vered was expressing ideas I myself had had. 
A desire to cry as much into his ear and 
force his admiration wrung me; but I sup- 
pressed it, to listen again. 

" The public, it is true, have," he went 
on, " some justification for the skepticism 
with which they have always treated the 
conclusions of philosophers; but I have only 
to turn my eyes inward to be increasingly 
convinced that here at least philosophy is in 
the right. The attributes of my mind — will, 
attention, and the rest — are, I observe with 
an instinctive displeasure, subject to the same 
laws that rule my body. The athlete expe- 
riences pleasure from his over-developed sin- 
ews during the brief time that he retains the 
memory of his former inferiority ; afterwards, 
comparison becoming impossible once the 
[ 258] 



An Interview 

recollection of what he was has faded, he is 
conscious of no superiority. Nevertheless he 
has become the slave of his own strength. 
The muscles which he has trained into ab- 
normal power must be ministered to, or a 
degeneration of his whole body will set in. 
Thus it is with the minds of authors. Their 
vanity has grown with pampering, like the 
liver of a Swiss goose. Flattery, which at 
first afforded them enjoyment, has become 
a necessity." 

He paused, with a bitter smile. 

" For pleasurable companionship," he 
added, " seek out men of affairs. Avoid au- 
thors and artists." 

" And musicians," I suggested. 

" And musicians," said Anatole France 
fervently. 

There was a little pause. I was unhappy ; 
for my exultation that Anatole France had 
expressed my own thought was less than my 
dissatisfaction that he did not know it. 

" There were so many things I wanted to 
[ 259 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

speak to you of," I faltered at last helplessly, 
" and now they are all gone. Do you re- 
member Heine's account of his meeting 
with Goethe ? He had thought for years of 
the things he would discuss with the great 
man, but when he finally met him he found 
nothing to say except that the plums were 
ripe along the road he had followed." 

" But I am very far from being Goethe," 
said Anatole France. 

" Not so far as I from being Heine," I 
added hastily. 

The author of " Thais " smiled again. 
"The compliment is neat," he observed. 

I thanked him deprecatingly, but I felt 
secretly that he was right. 

" You are the first American," he re- 
marked, " to — you are American ? " (I 
nodded) — " the first to write me concern- 
ing Monsieur Bergeret. I had fancied him 
unknown in your country." 

" In America," I replied, " every one who 
reads French knows * Le Livre de Mon 
[ 260 ] 



An Interview 

Ami,' and every one who reads anything 
besides the magazines and the current fic- 
tion is familiar with *The Crime of Syl- 
vestre Bonnard ' ; but those who dehght in 
* Le Mannequin d' Osier,' emancipated as 
they are from social caste (for such an eman- 
cipation is one of the essentials to understand- 
ing Monsieur Bergeret), belong, I think, all 
the more, if unknowingly, to an intellectual 
caste, one of the rules of which is that ac- 
quaintance with an author's books does not 
give one the right to infringe on his per- 
sonal life. I have broken the rule. I am 
unworthy of my class." 

" It was a foolish rule," said Anatole 
France. 

His eyes sparkled, and I laughed. I was 
reminded of a fencing exhibition I had wit- 
nessed once at the exercises of a girls' school. 
There had been no lunging, but much salut- 
ing and courteous crossing of foils. 

" You said in your letter," he remarked 
simply, " that you admired my * Histoire 
[ 261 ] 



The Book of Paris 

Contemporaine/ but you did not say why. I 
should like to know now — if you will tell 
me." 

I was flattered. It could be only interest 
in me that prompted his question, for he 
knew already a thousand times better than 
I why the books were masterpieces. He 
could learn nothing new about them from 
my reply, but he would learn what manner 
of person I was. My responsibility to my- 
self was oppressive. 

" There are so many reasons," I stam- 
mered. " I do not know where to begin." 

" Beginnings are hard and invariably 
wrong," he observed thoughtfully, ," so it 
does not matter ; begin anywhere." 

" I think most of all it is for their point 
of view," I said, "that I like the books, — 
the scrutinizing irony with which in them 
you look out on life, generalizing freely and 
acutely, but honestly and carefully, never 
unworthily from the mere masculine love of 
generalization, and finding the most where 
[ 262 ] 



Passage des Patriarches — Rue Mouffetard 



^fc\<? 



An Interview 

it seems to me the most is always to be found, 
— in the little things. It was, unless I mis- 
take, from the tearful brutish protest of the 
servant Euphemie that Monsieur Bergeret 
drew the profoundest reflection in * Le Man- 
nequin d' Osier,' — that concerning the fail- 
ure in the feminine mind to distinguish 
between the creative and the destructive 
forces.'* 

"Yes," he assented. 
' " People have reproached you for treating 
too much the petty \mesqui7i\ side of things, 
but that is because, accustomed to the hero- 
ics of most works of fiction, they forget that 
it is almost entirely of what is mesquin that 
life is composed. There are heroics — and 
heroism too — in your books ; who will say 
that there were not both in the conduct of 
poor Madame de Bonmont ? but, as nearly 
always in life, they were at the same time 
absurd ;"^and this too was unpleasant to those 
readers." 

"You are a warm adherent," said Ana- 
[ 263 ] 



'The Book of Paris 

tole France with a smile. I flushed. " But 
what you say is discerning," he added kindly. 
"My 'Histoire Contemporaine' will never 
be genuinely liked by the mass of readers, 
not even by the mass of intelligent readers ; 
they have been fed too long on sweets, — 
though less here, I believe," he continued, 
"than in England or America." 

" Oh ! " I exclaimed sadly, " in England 
and America it is considered praise to say 
of a book that it may without danger be 
placed in the hands of a sixteen-year-old 
girl. The effect on our prose has been ap- 
palling. That some books should be writ- 
ten for girls of sixteen is well enough ; that 
all books should be is distressing. The result 
has been to bar our prose-writers from the 
frank consideration of much that is vitally 
important in life, and to force them often 
into hypocrisy." 

"Yet you have had books which were 
not afraid to discuss things as they are." 

" In the eighteenth century, yes ; few 
[ 264] 



An Interview 

since. Our poetry, thank God, has always 
been freer." 

" Your poetry is inimitable ; and your prose 
may yet be emancipated. Victorianism, Eng- 
lishmen tell me, is dying.*' 

" There was something else," I remarked 
a little timidly after a pause, " that I wanted 
to say of the * Histoire Contemporaine.' It 
will perhaps weary you, but I should feel an 
ingrate if I should go away without having 
said it." 

"I should be sorry not to hear it," he 
returned. " What you have already said has 
interested me." 

" It was," I continued, " that in the form 
of those books you have gone one step be- 
yond the novel." 

It seemed to me that for the first time I 
had really interested Anatole France. He 
looked at me keenly. 

" The novel is a splendid form, — the 
best we have had," I went on, " and much 
has certainly been done through it ; but even 
[ 265 ] 



T'he Book of Paris 

the novel truckles to romance. It has too 
sharp a beginning, too definite an ending; 
it is too much a whole to be capable of en- 
tire usefulness. In it the characters created 
fit together too nicely, so that in looking 
back from the end to the beginning one is 
aware of a rigid unity, a careful plan. To 
achieve such a work of art, to eliminate 
everything that has no bearing on the theme, 
to create only characters that serve in its de- 
velopment, must demand great talent; but, 
noble as the result is, it seems to me cramped 
by its own perfection. Life is not like that. It 
has both purpose and purposelessness. Things 
do not dovetail so accurately. Everywhere 
there are ragged ends hanging loose. In the 
four books of the 'Histoire Contemporaine' 
you let them hang. The characters you cre- 
ated have some influence on one another, 
but no more than they would have had if 
they had actually existed, and never for the 
furtherance of an artistic scheme. At times 
their lives touched, at times ran separately. 
[ 266 ] 



An Interview 

And yet it seems to me that in standing aside 
as you did, in watching it all as an observer, 
in giving never your own view of life, but 
the view held by each of your characters, 
you achieved a wider and truer unity than 
was ever reached in a novel." 

I paused apprehensively, abashed at my 
presumptuousness. But the author's look was 
kindly. 

" Your appreciation,'* said Anatole France, 
" is very grateful to me. That was indeed 
what I attempted to do." 

Then we talked on — mostly it was I who 
talked — of Monsieur Bergeret, of Madame 
de Gromance, of the abbe Lantaigne and 
the abbe — later the bishop — Guitrel, of 
the prefet Worms-Clavelin and his amazing 
wife, and of the dog Riquet. 

"The dog Riquet," observed Anatole 
France, " has the character accorded by all 
novelists who are liked to their heroes. In 
his attitude toward life there are unselfish- 
ness, humility and idealism. These qualities 
[ ^^7\ 



The Book of Paris 

are in fact to be found only in dogs. That 
is why novels, as you have so justly observed, 
are untrustworthy." 

I rose to go. " It would be useless to at- 
tempt to tell you, monsieur, with what grati- 
tude and pleasure I shall remember this hour 
you have granted me," I said; and he must 
have recognized my sincerity ; for his smile 
was kindly. " It is such courtesy as that you 
have shown me which makes me love Paris," 
I went on. (There were vague thoughts 
struggling to take shape at the bottom of 
my mind. I must express them ; for I felt 
them to be worth while.) " Friends, I think, 
are for the big things of life" (I know I 
spoke confusedly), " to depend on or to help 
in the great emergencies; and the two or 
three friends one needs one can perhaps most 
readily find among his own people. But 
while the big things arrive only very rarely, 
the little things are with us every day ; 
our very social existence is constructed of 
them. For them one has acquaintances ; and 
[ 268 ] 



An Interview 

acquaintances are more readily made here, I 
believe, than anywhere else under the sun. 
Friendship, after all, is somewhat barbarous, 
requiring on both sides a total loyalty which 
is unnatural, given the mutual knowledge of 
faults that must exist in so close an intimacy ; 
acquaintanceship is less exacting and more 
civilized, binding one to nothing, and ask- 
ing only that faults be kept discreetly out of 
sight for the time being. You knew, mon- 
sieur, that you would see me only for an 
hour and then perhaps never again, and yet 
there has been no hint of that in your kind- 
ness to me. You have talked with me as 
pleasantly as though we had dined together 
yesterday and were to drive in the Bois to- 
morrow. Paris is the only civilized country 
in the world. That is why I love it." 

"Thank you," said Anatole France. "That 
is a very pretty speech." 

" It was a very long one," I replied. 

" You live in Paris always? " he inquired, 
touching the bell. 

[ 269] 



"The Book of Paris 

« Yes." 

" One has to be a little foreign to be a 
Parisian," he went on musingly. "Those 
Frenchmen who are not so already, hasten 
to marry an American or adopt an English 
accent. But you will go back." 

"To my own people?" 

"Yes." 

" I am sorry you say that," I remarked, 
"for I have secretly known it all along." 

"Why be sorry?" he asked. "Is it so 
dreadful — America ? " 

" No," I answered quickly, " it is not 
dreadful. It is vulgar ; but its vulgarity is 
only a sign of its exuberant vitality." 

Anatole France nodded. " Vulgarity is to 
be found in whatever is great and young and 
splendid. Beethoven was vulgar, and Shake- 
speare and Michel Angelo." 

" No, truly it is not dreadful," I repeated 
remorsefully. 

He smiled. " No one is so detached as he 
thinks himself," he said. " One destroys pre- 
[ 270 ] 



An Interview 

judice after prejudice and conviction after 
conviction, as a man in a balloon cuts the 
cords that connect him with the ground and 
prevent his rising to a point whence he can 
look down on all things with a just and com- 
paring gaze, yet there are always a thousand 
delicate fibres that hold him back from per- 
fect freedom. You are cutting, cutting, but 
you are not completely detached, nor will 
you ever be. When I asked you whether 
America was dreadful you felt a swift shame 
at having insinuated as much. You are still 
patriotic." 

" Perhaps," I murmured. 

"Yet patriotism is just one of our innu- 
merable prejudices. In a way, I confess to 
finding it admirable. I envy the ability of 
a man to hate passionately and inclusively a 
whole race, simply because he does not be- 
long to it. I envy, because such a hatred 
reveals an intensity of feeling of which I am 
incapable. I envy, because I cannot under- 
stand. People are so pitifully alike \se res- 
[ 271 ] 



The Book of Paris 

semblent si tristemeni\y' said Anatole France 
wearily. 

" It is strange," he went on, " that patriot- 
ism should be so hard to shake off; for it is 
one of the most obvious prejudices. It is in- 
deed no more than an expression of vanity, 
of the old thought, * What 's mine is better 
than what 's yours ! ' '* 

*' Perhaps that itself is the reason," I sug- 
gested. "Is not vanity very important?" 

" True," he assented. " Not vanity but 
selfishness, of which vanity is a corollary. 
Selfishness is at the root of every creative 
impulse. Without it the world would stop 
— or that little scum on the face of the 
world, that senseless activity, we call life." 

" Uespece de corruption que nous appelons 
la vie organiquej' I quoted swiftly. 

" I am flattered that you remember so 
well," he observed. "Ambition, inspiration, 
love, — they are all forms of selfishness — 
love more than the rest, as it is the most in- 
tensely creative." 

[ 272 ] 



An Interview 

"But,'* I asked, "if patriotism is only- 
vanity, why is it held to be something high 
and noble?" 

" At all times,*' he replied, " men's vanity 
has made them contemplate incredulously 
their own futility, and led them to imagine 
themselves the tools of some higher force. 
With this premise selfishness was no longer 
a conceivable motive. It does no harm for 
the philosopher to recognize that God is 
on the side of the greater numbers, but 
the common soldier must think differently. 
No war of aggrandizement, or of selfish 
interest, has ever been successfully waged 
without a noble catch-word. * God and My 
Right' was the slogan of Henry V as he 
laid waste France ; the Germans sang * Ein' 
Feste Burg ist unser Gott,' in the Franco- 
Prussian War, which was brought on by a 
forged telegram ; and a poetess of your own 
country, I am told, has in a popular hymn 
made the armies of the North in your late 
war suggest that as Christ *died to make 
[ 273 ] 



"The Book of Paris 

men holy/ they would * die to make men 
free.' " 

The servant had been waiting a long time. 
Anatole France took my hand. 

" Your visit has given me a real pleasure," 
he said kindly. " I hope you will believe 
me." 

" I must because I want so much to," I 
answered wistfully. 

Then, when I was almost at the door, 
"You will go back sooner or later to your 
own country," he added, " but do not feel 
badly. You will never quite become part of 
it. Even from a captive balloon one has 
a wider, less biased view than from the 
ground." 

I drifted out of the house in a dream. 
Anatole France had said that my visit had 
given him pleasure. Anatole France had 
talked with me as with an equal. And, in- 
deed, reflecting on the interview, I was not 
displeased with myself. That speech on 
friendship and acquaintanceship had held 
[ 274 ] 



On Boulevard Sebastopol 



An Interview 

ideas. The memory of the mocking little 
smile that had played around one corner of 
the great man's mouth from time to time 
barely troubled me. It was for others that 
his face had taken those lines ; me he had 
not laughed at, I was sure. 

But, in considering myself, which I have 
always done rather closely (with an intense, 
if amused, interest which my growing con- 
viction that what I see there is rarely unique 
keeps from becoming fatuous), I am contin- 
ually amazed at the abrupt changes in my 
moods. Thus I had barely reached the Ave- 
nue du Bois before my exhilaration left me 
like a fog that, suddenly lifting, lays bare 
the barren country beneath. I had seen Ana- 
tole France and heard him speak, and my 
sole concern was for what I had said, for 
the impression I had made. I had been given 
such an opportunity as would not come to 
one American out of ten thousand, and I 
had squandered it. I had had an hour with 
Anatole France, and I had spent it in trying 
[ 275 ] 



The Book of Paris 

to show him that he might talk to me with- 
out stooping. Moreover, it was clear to me 
at present that this too had been at the root 
of my desire to meet my hero. I understood 
the twisted smile now, and was swept with 
humiliation. Then, effacing this petty shame 
with a profounder regret, came the thought 
of what I might have learned if I had not 
been preoccupied with myself. I had been 
unworthy of my riches ; they had been, I 
muttered, as pearls before — But I would 
not finish the quotation. The word was too 
offensive in French, and I was still thinking 
in French. I had indeed seldom felt more 
French than now, when I knew so well that 
I should some day go back to America. And, 
after all, whatever I had missed, my hour 
with Anatole France had been splendid. 
(You will know without needing to be told 
that, having reached the end of the avenue, 
I was gazing up now at the Arc de Tri- 
omphe, if, like me, you too have stood be- 
fore it and felt your own inner bickerings 
[ V^ ] 



Cafes 



An Interview 

stilled by its white solemnity.) But the re- 
gret, though less acute, remained. There 
were so many things I might have learned ! 
Why had I not at least asked — 

The bell in a nearby church boomed two, 
and I started up in my chair with a smile. 
When one looks into the fire it is as though 
time were passing ; dreams are almost as real 
as events. It was still November. My letter 
to Anatole France was on the table at my 
hand. I picked it up, laid it on the coals, 
and watched it as it curled inward, turned 
black, and burst into sudden flame. 



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